Codec Compression Efficiency Evaluation for Ultra Low–Latency Cloud Gaming Applications

Video streaming applications, both on-demand and real-time, have seen tremendous growth and acceptance in the past two decades. To meet the increasing demand and user expectations of such any time, any device, any place availability of such services, there is a need for higher compression efficiency codecs and intelligent encoding strategies.This paper presents a comparative codec compression efficiency evaluation of the four most popular and widely used codec compression standards (H.264, HEVC, VP9 and AV1) for cloud gaming applications considering ultra-low latency encoding settings on a 4K gaming video dataset. Our results considering multiple resolution-bitrate pair encoding show that under strict ultra-low latency encoding settings, software codec implementations of VP9 and AV1 codecs perform better than H.264 and HEVC in terms of quality and rate savings albeit at an increased encoding time compared to H.264, especially at higher resolutions.