VVC Complexity and Software Implementation Analysis

A steady increase in available processing power continues to drive advances in video compression technology. The recently completed Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard aims to double the compression efficiency of HEVC and deliver a same quality of video at half the bitrate. To achieve this goal, VVC includes several new methods that improve coding efficiency at the cost of increased complexity. This paper provides a complexity analysis of VVC and its VTM reference software. Whereas VVC is more complex than HEVC, it remains readily implementable in software on current generation processors. Performance of practical decoders are reported, showing that real-time decoding of 8K content is feasible. An encoder is also presented, showing that most of the compression gains of VVC over HEVC can be obtained at a small fraction of the resources needed by the VTM encoder under common test conditions.