filmcraft/docs/performance.md

Performance

cargo xtask bench measures the whole app headlessly and writes target/bench/bench-<label>.json and .md (options and sections: testing.md §5). Agents read live counters with perf.stats (control-protocol.md).

Read the numbers with the load average. These results come from a shared Apple M4 Pro (14 cores, 48 GB, macOS 15 / Darwin 24.6) with parallel agent builds running: load average 75–200 during every run below. Wall-clock columns (fps, shown/dropped frames, seek latency) swing by 2–5× between back-to-back runs at that load and are only comparable within one run. CPU time per frame, samples decoded and skipped, and peak RSS are much less sensitive, and are what the before/after comparison relies on. Each milestone below alternated base / after runs (2 rounds each); the most load-independent figure is the decoder's own cycle count (proc_pid_rusage instructions and cycles of a process, all threads summed).

Memory of clips on a timeline (MEM1–MEM3)

Measured on the desktop release build with footprint, heap and malloc_history (MallocStackLogging=lite), 2026-10-05: twelve H.264 clips dropped on a timeline took the process to a 12 GB footprint, 10.8 GB of it live heap in three piles.

1. Media files read whole (2.9 GB), MEM1. The desktop host had no Services::reader, so MediaPool::open_file fell back to read_file and every clip's bytes stayed in memory for as long as its source was open. FsServices::reader now returns a filmcraft_media::reader::FileReader: the file stays open and containers read their index and then single samples with positional reads, as the web host already did through BlobReader (web.md). Formats decoded in one go (stills, WAV, MPEG elementary streams) are still read whole through the reader.

2. A decoder per clip, for good (3.5 GB), MEM2. Every source kept its decoder once it had decoded a frame, with its reference pictures and the pictures its frame threads have in flight: about 290 MB per clip here (h264 PicState, Frame::make_row). The GOP caches now share a pool (crates/codecs/src/gop.rs): beyond MAX_LIVE_DECODERS (4) the least recently used caches that have been idle for 3 s drop their decoder and make a new one when asked again, which costs what a seek costs. A cache in use (a layer of the frame being composited, the next clip being prefetched) always keeps its decoder, so a composite of more than four clips does not restart decoders on every frame. perf.stats reports decode.liveDecoders.

3. A frame budget per clip, none overall (3.8 GB), MEM3. Each GOP cache keeps up to 384 MB of decoded frames (at least 64 frames), which every clip on the timeline filled and kept. The pool now counts the frames of all caches against FRAME_BUDGET (1 GiB): over it, caches idle for 3 s give up frames, least recently used cache first, earliest frames first. Caches in use keep their own budget, because a frame evicted before it is shown costs a re-decode from the keyframe. perf.stats reports decode.cacheMB and decode.cacheBudgetMB; before, this memory appeared in no counter (frames.cache covers the frame server's rendered images and GPU plans only).

4. Freed planes the allocator keeps (2.5 GB), MEM4. With MEM1–MEM3 the same twelve clips took 5.1 GB, only 2.5 GB of it live: every decoded picture allocated three planes and every eviction freed them, and the system allocator kept the freed pages (footprint: 1.7 GB reclaimable). filmcraft_frame::pool now keeps the planes of evicted frames (up to 192 MiB per sample type; a frame something else still holds is left alone) and the H.264 decoder and the VideoToolbox path decode into them, so steady-state decoding allocates no planes. perf.stats reports decode.planePoolMB and decode.planesReused.

The same session showed that the desktop app never used hardware decoding: register() was an argument of a log::info! that no logger evaluated (fixed under HW1; decode.hardware.sessions was 0 with every frame decoded in software).

What remains per live decoder is unchanged: the H.264 decoder publishes each macroblock row of a picture as its own allocations (Frame::make_row, five per row), which is where the 290 MB per decoder comes from.

Results (CPU compositor: layer rectangles, an opaque bottom layer and recycled images, before → after)

The CPU compositor is what export runs. In a profile of a 9:29 export it took about a third of the busy CPU with the built-in H.264 encoder (the encoder took the other two thirds), and a faster encoder leaves it as the largest cost of an export. It works on premultiplied linear f32 images, 33 MB each at 1080p, and every layer was one of them: a banner that is transparent except for its bottom 100 rows still cost a full conversion and a full mix, and the bottom layer paid for a zero-filled canvas and a pass that mixes it over that canvas.

Apple M1 (8 cores: 4 performance + 4 efficiency), 2026-10-06, a machine that was not idle, so the two builds ran alternately in the same session and the median is reported.

Per frame, synthetic 1080p sources

cargo run --release -p filmcraft-render --example frame_bench: an 8-bit 4:2:0 camera picture and a 10-bit 4:4:4 banner with alpha only in its bottom 100 rows; render_sequence followed by the conversion to 8-bit RGBA, milliseconds per frame (median of 40 frames, 5 alternating rounds):

scenario	before	after
camera only	8.9	6.5
camera + banner	16.2	7.8

Both builds give the same picture (same checksum).

A real export

30 s of a 1080p25 camera clip with a ProRes 4444 banner, exported with the built-in encoder (deterministic, byte for byte): 46.4 s before, 36.7 s after. The two exports are the same file (same bytes, same MD5), so every frame of the real pipeline (camera decode, ProRes decode, compositing, conversion) matches. The encoder is most of that time; with a faster one the compositor's savings are a larger part of the export.

What is left in a frame without overlays is the Y'CbCr → linear float conversion of the camera picture (4.5 ms in the synthetic case) and the conversion to 8 bits (2 ms).

Results (GPU2: standard effects on the GPU compositor, #30, before → after)

Before = this change with clips that carry standard effects sent back to the CPU layer path in render::plan (same binary otherwise); after = GPU2. New stack3-fx scenario: stack3 with Brightness & Contrast + Gaussian Blur (blurriness 8) on V2 and Tint (70 %) on V3. bench_playback --scenario stack3-fx,stack3 --res full|half --gpu (release), 8 s plays, two rounds alternating before / after on 2026-10-05 at load average 107–170 (1-minute; 5-minute 141–152). stack3 in the same runs is the control; it shows how much the load alone moved the numbers.

case	shown/dropped before (2 runs)	after (2 runs)	CPU ms/frame before → after	worker svc p50 before → after
stack3-fx Full	0/192, 0/192	192/0, 132/60	84, 92 → 94, 89	245, 220 → 1.8, 93 ms
stack3-fx 1/2	9/183, 15/177	181/11, 166/26	111, 110 → 92, 92	295, 307 → 6.5, 28 ms
stack3 Full (control)	180/12, 189/3	172/19, 80/112	92, 92 → 89, 80	7.2, 5.1 → 17.8, 185 ms
stack3 1/2 (control)	138/54, 181/11	116/76, 134/53	91, 92 → 83, 91	61, 15 → 123, 106 ms

Before, every frame of the effect stack was rendered on the CPU (Gaussian Blur and the two colour effects on 1080p layers): ≈ 250 ms of worker time per frame, so playback showed nothing at Full and 5–8 % of frames at ½ (CPU ms/frame stays near 90 only because most jobs were cancelled before finishing). After, the workers only decode, as for stack3: the effect stage runs on the GPU at present time (UI present p50 11–24 ms vs 11–39 ms for the control in the same runs). The second "after Full" run coincided with a load spike (load 155 → 170; the control dropped 112 frames in the same minute).

Results (HW1: VideoToolbox hardware decoding, Off → Auto)

Same commit, Settings ▸ Playback ▸ Hardware decoding switched with the bench flag --hw off / --hw auto (cargo xtask bench --sections decode --only dec_h --repeat 3 --hw …, then --sections playback --only h264 and --only hevc-2160), 2026-10-05, Apple M4 Pro, load average 150–190 throughout (shared with other agent builds). The decoded pictures are identical either way (bit-exact parity tests, crates/platform/tests/videotoolbox.rs); only who decodes changes.

Decode (every frame through the media stack)

codec	size	CPU ms/frame Off → Auto	fps Off → Auto (best of 3)
H.264	1080p	31.8 → 1.2	153 → 389
H.264	2160p	119.3 → 4.2	35 → 107
HEVC	1080p	22.2 → 1.1	185 → 708
HEVC	2160p	85.7 → 3.7	49 → 217

CPU time per frame is what is left on the CPU: the sample copy into a CMSampleBuffer, copying the decoded biplanar picture out into planar Y'CbCr (chroma deinterleaved; 10-bit shifted down), and the GOP cache. An earlier synchronous version (one picture decoding at a time) reached only 155 / 51 / 449 / 149 fps; asynchronous decompression with two access units in flight overlaps decoding with the copy-out.

Program-monitor playback (8 s, GPU path)

case	shown/dropped Off → Auto	CPU ms/frame Off → Auto
H.264 1080p Full	192/0 → 192/0	38.1 → 3.8
H.264 2160p Full	104/88 → 192/0	119.8 → 9.2
H.264 2160p 1/2	1/191 → 192/0	95.5 → 9.0
H.264 2160p 1/4	0/192 → 192/0	94.3 → 8.8
HEVC 2160p Full	175/17 → 192/0	105.6 → 9.1
HEVC 2160p 1/2	190/2 → 192/0	97.4 → 8.8
HEVC 2160p 1/2 draft	190/2 → 191/1	107.0 → 22.3

At this load the software decoders drop most 4K H.264 frames; with hardware decoding every case plays in real time at a tenth of the CPU. Draft playback costs more CPU than full-quality playback with hardware decoding: the hardware ignores draft mode (set_draft is a no-op) and the draft plan's box decimation of the planes, cheap next to software decoding, is now the main CPU cost. Zero-copy upload of the decoded CVPixelBuffer into wgpu (no copy-out at all) is the next step (issue #30).

Results (HW2: VideoToolbox hardware H.264 encoding, built-in → hardware)

Apple M1 (8 cores, 16 GB), 2026-10-06, single runs on an otherwise idle machine, release build. Hardware encoding is opt-in per export (hardware_encoding: auto); the built-in encoder is unchanged.

The encoder alone (100 frames of 1920×1080 25 fps camera footage, High, one-pass VBR, keyframe every 50)

Frames go in as planar Y'CbCr and out as compressed frames (NV12 fill, VTCompressionSessionEncodeFrame, flush); quality is the luma PSNR of our software decoder's output against the input.

target	B-frames	real bitrate	luma PSNR	frames/s
4 Mb/s	off	3982 kb/s	41.66 dB	202
8 Mb/s	off	7987 kb/s	43.44 dB	202
16 Mb/s	off	15972 kb/s	45.55 dB	202
4 Mb/s	on	4220 kb/s	41.37 dB	183
8 Mb/s	on	8268 kb/s	43.41 dB	197
16 Mb/s	on	16388 kb/s	45.66 dB	199

B-frames buy nothing measurable here (±0.3 dB) and overshoot the target by up to 5 %, so the hardware encoder runs without them: frames come out in presentation order and the muxer needs no composition offsets or edit list.

Whole exports (1080p25 camera clip with ProRes 4444 overlays with alpha, AAC, loudness normalised to −14 LUFS)

A 9:29 timeline (569 s, 14 227 frames): the camera clip, an intro, six banners, three subscribe bars and an outro.

encoder	wall time	frames/s	vs real time	file
built-in (filmcraft-h264enc)	793 s	17.9	1.4× slower	1445 MB, 20.0 Mb/s
hardware (VideoToolbox)	311 s	45.7	1.8× faster	1417 MB, 19.6 Mb/s

2.5× faster. The first 134 s of the same timeline, where the overlays are densest (intro, a banner, a subscribe bar and the outro in 134 s):

encoder	wall time	frames/s	vs real time	file
built-in (filmcraft-h264enc)	395 s	8.5	2.9× slower	340 MB, 20.0 Mb/s
hardware (VideoToolbox)	84 s	39.9	1.6× faster	312 MB, 18.3 Mb/s

4.7× faster there. The gain depends on what else an export spends its time on: with the encoder off the CPU, what is left is decoding the camera clip, the CPU compositor (every layer, alpha included) and the RGBA → Y'CbCr conversion.

The pairs of files have the same frame count and duration, decode in ffmpeg without a message, and compare at SSIM 0.990 / PSNR 46.7 dB over the 134 s (lowest frame: 45.1 dB) and SSIM 0.989–0.990 / PSNR 46.3–46.6 dB at six 3-second spots of the full export. Audio is identical.

Where the built-in export's time goes (sample on the process during a 20 s export, inclusive CPU time in the call tree; the figures overlap because work-stealing mixes the tasks): about two thirds of the busy CPU is in the encoder, about a third in compositing and layer decoding. Moving the encoder to the media engine removes most of the first and lets the next batch render while the previous one encodes (the exporter renders a batch of frames in parallel, then encodes it). What is left is the CPU compositor, the next target of #30 ("GPU export").

Results (HW3: VideoToolbox hardware H.265 (HEVC) encoding, against hardware H.264)

Apple M1 (8 cores, 16 GB), 2026-10-07, single runs on an otherwise idle machine, release build. Both encoders are the M1's media engine. H.265 is Format::Hevc (Main, 8-bit 4:2:0, one-pass VBR, no B-frames); H.264 is the opt-in hardware encoder of HW2 (High).

Speed

The raw encoders (ffmpeg's hevc_videotoolbox and h264_videotoolbox on a 1080p25 test pattern, 500 frames): 166 and 189 frames/s. H.265 is the codec that compresses further, not the faster one to encode.

The 9:29 timeline of HW2 (camera clip, ProRes 4444 overlays, AAC, loudness normalised to −14 LUFS), 20 Mb/s H.264 and 10 Mb/s H.265: 204 s and 195 s (CPU 1042 s and 1029 s), files of 1417 MB and 719 MB. The same time: the same H.264 export took 193 s and 200 s on other runs. The export is bound by the CPU compositor and the decoders, not by the encoder, so a different hardware codec does not change it.

Quality per bit

30 s with a banner (15–45 s of that timeline), exported by FilmCraft as ProRes 422 HQ (the reference) and by each encoder at several bitrates; ffmpeg's psnr and ssim of the decoded 4:2:0 pictures against the reference. Average PSNR over the three planes, and SSIM (higher is better):

Mb/s	H.264	H.265	difference	H.264 Mb/s for H.265's PSNR
20	46.88 dB, 0.9902	46.91 dB, 0.9903	+0.03 dB	beyond the range measured
10	44.96 dB, 0.9863	45.09 dB, 0.9863	+0.13 dB	10.5
6	43.72 dB, 0.9833	44.31 dB, 0.9843	+0.59 dB	7.7
4	42.91 dB, 0.9807	43.64 dB, 0.9825	+0.73 dB	5.8
3	42.37 dB, 0.9786	43.05 dB, 0.9807	+0.68 dB	4.3

At 10 Mb/s and above the two give the same picture. At 3–6 Mb/s H.265 reaches the same PSNR with 22–31 % less bitrate. Its worst frame is better at every bitrate (lowest per-frame PSNR 45.9 against 42.1 dB at 20 Mb/s, 43.1 against 41.5 dB at 10, 39.5 against 37.8 dB at 3).

So there is no case for a lower default bitrate: the two formats start at the same 20 Mb/s. H.265 pays off where the file size matters, at 3–6 Mb/s; that 9:29 timeline is 428 MB at 6 Mb/s.

Results (HW2: Windows Media Foundation / Direct3D 11 hardware decoding, Off → Auto)

Same binary (release build of the HW2 commit), Settings ▸ Playback ▸ Hardware decoding switched with --hw off / --hw auto, 2026-10-07: Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 (14 cores / 28 threads, 2.4 GHz), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 8 GB (driver 617.14), Windows 11 Pro 26200, idle machine. Two alternating rounds; the table gives the range of the two (decode: best of 3 within each). Reproduce with cargo xtask bench --sections decode --only dec_h264 --repeat 3 --hw off|auto (likewise dec_hevc) and --sections playback --only "h264-2160 full" --hw off|auto; set FILMCRAFT_FFMPEG if ffmpeg is not on PATH for the fixture generator. Pictures are identical either way (bit-exact parity tests, crates/platform/tests/media_foundation.rs). The decoder MFTs were Microsoft's H.264 decoder (Microsoft H264 Video Decoder MFT) and the HEVCVideoExtension decoder, both decoding with DXVA on the RTX 5060's NVDEC: nvidia-smi dmon -s u showed the decoder engine at 18–27 % during an Auto run and 0 % otherwise, and every picture came back as a Direct3D 11 texture.

Decode (every frame through the media stack)

codec	size	CPU ms/frame Off → Auto	fps Off → Auto
H.264	1080p	77–80 → 3.3	162–166 → 347–353
H.264	2160p	310–315 → 11.9	39–43 → 93
HEVC Main	1080p	69–73 → 3.5	89–93 → 307–308
HEVC Main	2160p	315–348 → 12–13	26–28 → 87–90
HEVC Main 10	2160p	314–336 → 17.6	32 → 57

Counters: every Auto row had hw frames = frames × 3 repeats (360 at 1080p, 216 at 2160p), 3 sessions, 0 fallbacks, 0 declined; every Off row had 0 hardware frames and 0 sessions.

What is left on the CPU is the readback: examples/mfprobe.rs --time splits a 2160p H.264 picture into 1.1 ms DXVA decode (feeding the MFT), 2.8 ms GPU to CPU copy (staging texture + map) and 7 ms CPU conversion (Annex B, biplanar to planar Y'CbCr); Main 10 is 1.4 / 4.5 / 10 ms (twice the bytes). A zero-copy path removes the last two.

Program-monitor playback (8 s, GPU path)

case	shown/dropped Off → Auto	CPU ms/frame Off → Auto
H.264 1080p Full	192/0 → 192/0	86–89 → 8.5–8.8
H.264 2160p Full	192/0 → 189–190/2–3	338–353 → 17–20
H.264 2160p 1/2	192/0 → 190/2	355–361 → 22
HEVC 2160p Full	112–152/40–80 → 191–192/0–1	355–364 → 18

This machine has 28 software-decoding threads, so Off keeps up with 4K H.264 (at 340 ms of CPU per frame, about 8 cores busy); Auto uses a twentieth of that CPU but drops 2–3 of 192 frames (readback latency at the start of the run). 4K HEVC is where Off drops frames and Auto does not. Draft playback (1/2 draft: 410–416 → 93–105 CPU ms/frame) is dominated by the draft plan's decimation, as on macOS, because the hardware ignores draft mode.

Results (HW4: Windows NVENC H.264 export, software → hardware)

Same machine as the HW2 results (Xeon E5-2680 v4, 28 threads, RTX 5060, driver 617.14, idle, 2026-10-07). cargo xtask bench --sections export --only h264 --hw off|auto --repeat 3: the export of 8 s of a 1080p23.976 H.264 clip (191 frames) to H.264 with the default preset, VBR one pass. --hw off runs the software encoder; --hw auto sets hardwareEncoding to auto and runs NVENC (preset P5, high-quality tuning). Every NVENC row had hw frames = 573 = 191 × 3 repeats.

encoder	fps	CPU ms/frame	MB
software	15.0 (12.7–12.8 s)	1050	20.4
NVENC	44 (4.3 s)	356–373	21.7

• The remaining CPU is the compositing and render of the frames and the RGBA → YUV conversion, not the encoder.
• The NVENC file is slightly larger at the same settings (21.7 vs 20.4 MB). The bitrate is not matched, so these rows are not a quality comparison.

Quality at equal bitrate: see the PR description.

Results (HW2 follow-up: Windows VP9 and AV1 hardware decoding, Off → Auto)

Same machine and method as the H.264 / HEVC results above (Xeon E5-2680 v4, RTX 5060 driver 617.14, idle, 2026-10-07, two alternating rounds of --hw off / --hw auto, the same binary). MFTs: VP9VideoExtensionDecoder and AV1VideoExtension (Microsoft Store codec extensions), DXVA on the GPU's NVDEC (profiles VP9 0 / 2, AV1 main). AV1 fixtures here are libaom (libsvtav1 is not in this ffmpeg build; the bench falls back to it) and VP9 are libvpx-vp9, as in the bench's dec_* specs. cargo xtask bench --sections decode --only dec_vp9 --repeat 3 --hw off|auto (likewise dec_av1), --sections playback --only "av1-2160 full" --hw off|auto.

codec	size	CPU ms/frame Off → Auto	fps Off → Auto (best of 3)
VP9	1080p	38-43 → 3.5-3.6	60 → 281-283
VP9	2160p	165-169 → 15-16	16 → 70-79
AV1	1080p	55-56 → 3.3-3.4	22 → 373-374
AV1	2160p	219-221 → 10.9-11.3	5.5 → 106-107

Every Auto row had hw frames = frames × 3 repeats, 3 sessions, 0 fallbacks, 0 declined.

playback 8 s, Full	shown/dropped Off → Auto	CPU ms/frame Off → Auto
VP9 2160p	11-12/180-181 → 191/1	117-124 → 24-27
AV1 2160p	0/192 → 192/0	47.5-47.9 → 17-20

Software AV1 decodes 4K at 5.5 fps here, so it never plays in real time; with the hardware decoder it plays without a drop. As on the other codecs, the hardware ignores draft mode and what is left on the CPU is the readback and plane conversion.

Results (Linux VA-API H.264 and HEVC hardware decoding, Off → Auto)

Same commit, Settings ▸ Playback ▸ Hardware decoding switched with the bench flag (cargo xtask bench --sections decode --only dec_h --repeat 3 --hw off|auto), 2026-10-08, Intel Core i5-13500H with Iris Xe graphics (Raptor Lake-P), 7.4 GB RAM, Intel iHD driver 26.1.2 through libva 2.22, load average 5–15. Only H.264 goes through VA-API so far; the HEVC rows decode in software either way and show the run-to-run spread. The decoded pictures are identical (bit-exact parity tests, crates/platform/tests/vaapi.rs).

codec	size	CPU ms/frame Off → Auto	fps Off → Auto (best of 3)	hw frames
H.264	1080p	103.7 → 2.3	133 → 263	360
H.264	2160p	416.5 → 11.4	32 → 56	216
HEVC	1080p	63.2 → 46.5	99 → 131	0
HEVC	2160p	349.5 → 353.7	30 → 35	0
HEVC Main 10	2160p	348.9 → 352.6	29 → 29	0

What is left on the CPU per H.264 frame is the host side of stateless decoding (parsing, DPB, filling the VA buffers) and the read-back: vaGetImage into an NV12 image and the copy into planar Y'CbCr. One picture is decoded at a time and read back as soon as the DPB outputs it, so 4K throughput (56 fps) is bound by that round trip, not by the video engine; overlapping decode and read-back, or zero-copy into wgpu, would raise it.

HEVC through VA-API (HW5 follow-up)

Same machine and commands on 2026-10-09 with HEVC added, at a lower load (the software decoders ran faster than in the table above; compare within a row). H.264 is unchanged; every HEVC stream now goes through VA-API too (216–360 hardware frames, no fallbacks), bit-exact with the software decoder.

codec	size	CPU ms/frame Off → Auto	fps Off → Auto (best of 3)
H.264	1080p	57.3 → 2.6	227 → 241
H.264	2160p	231.8 → 12.6	58 → 52
HEVC	1080p	45.6 → 2.3	141 → 341
HEVC	2160p	202.5 → 10.1	47 → 76
HEVC Main 10	2160p	211.6 → 18.4	42 → 46

At this lower load the multi-threaded software decoders keep up with the one-picture-at-a-time hardware path on throughput for H.264 and 10-bit HEVC, at 5–20 % of their CPU time; under load (the run above) the hardware path is ahead on both. 10-bit pictures cost more to read back (P010 is twice the bytes of NV12 and is shifted down into 16-bit planes).

Results (GPU1: blend modes on the GPU compositor, #30, before → after)

Before = this change with the old whole-frame CPU fallback for non-Normal blend modes put back in render::plan (same binary otherwise); after = GPU1. New stack3-blend scenario: stack3 (three 1080p23.976 H.264 clips, V2/V3 scaled, positioned, rotated, 70–85 % opacity) with V2 in Screen and V3 in Overlay. cargo xtask bench-playback --scenario stack3-blend,stack3 --res full,half, GPU path, 8 s plays, two alternating rounds each on 2026-10-05 at load average 33–63 (1-minute; 5-minute 67–81).

case	shown/dropped before (2 runs)	after (2 runs)	CPU ms/frame before → after	worker svc p50 before → after
stack3-blend Full	19/173, 138/54	191/1, 192/0	168, 214 → 86, 87	258, 219 → 1.2, 1.2 ms
stack3-blend 1/2	192/0, 192/0	191/1, 192/0	158, 151 → 89, 88	66, 99 → 1.1, 1.0 ms
stack3 Full (control, Normal)	192/0, 192/0	191/1, 192/0	88, 88 → 91, 88	1.3, 1.6 → 0.9, 1.5 ms
stack3 1/2 (control, Normal)	191/1, 192/0	192/0, 192/0	82, 90 → 90, 89

A stack with blend modes now costs what the same stack in Normal does: the frame workers only decode, and the UI-thread present (upload and draw, including the backdrop copies for the two blended layers) stays at 9–10 ms p50, as for stack3. Before, every frame was composited on the CPU (≈ 2 cores more at 23.976 fps) and Full resolution could not keep up at this load.

Results (M4.10: 4K VP9, AV1 and HEVC, before → after)

Baseline = commit a814ff6 (decoders unchanged since M4.8); after = M4.10. Interleaved runs on 2026-10-03 at load average 170-320 (two base and two after rounds; the second bench round of each overlapped another bench run, so its wall-clock columns are extra pessimistic).

Decoder work per frame (load-independent)

Codec examples (vp9dec, av1dec, hevcdec) on the cargo xtask bench decode clips, CPU cycles counted by the kernel (/usr/bin/time -l, all threads summed), mean of the two rounds; output bit-exact with ffmpeg / libdav1d at every thread count:

stream	1 thread before → after	14 threads before → after	wall ms / frame, 14 threads, before → after
VP9 1080p	68.0 → 52.0 (−24 %)	100.7 → 57.9 (−43 %)	95, 82 → 18, 17
VP9 2160p	273.6 → 205.8 (−25 %)	391.7 → 219.2 (−44 %)	146, 118 → 38, 36
HEVC 1080p	90.9 → 67.3 (−26 %)	100.2 → 75.1 (−25 %)	17, 10 → 5, 13
HEVC 2160p	362.6 → 262.3 (−28 %)	398.3 → 284.8 (−28 %)	24, 55 → 26, 25
AV1 1080p	60.5 → 48.3 (−20 %)	63.6 → 51.9 (−18 %)	26, 8 → 8, 7
AV1 2160p	212.5 → 172.4 (−19 %)	220.0 → 177.1 (−20 %)	158, 39 → 20, 32

Mcycles per frame. Draft mode (1 thread): HEVC 2160p 232.5 (−11 % on top), AV1 2160p 167.9 (−3 %: SVT-AV1's top-layer frames filter little); the VP9 clips have no non-reference frames.

Decode (every frame through the media stack)

codec	size	CPU ms/frame before (2 rounds)	after (2 rounds)	fps before → after
VP9	1080p	33.6, 30.8	23.5, 21.7	14, 17 → 67, 56
VP9	2160p	120.2, 117.7	68.4, 67.9	9.1, 7.8 → 34, 27
HEVC	1080p	31.2, 29.3	23.9, 22.4	50, 58 → 138, 145
HEVC	2160p	117.9, 111.8	86.9, 82.1	13, 14 → 30, 41
AV1	1080p	18.5, 18.9	15.1, 15.7	53, 44 → 122, 69
AV1	2160p	64.8, 66.7	48.4, 51.3	16, 8.9 → 25, 25

Program-monitor playback, 2160p (8 s, GPU path; new vp9-2160 / av1-2160 scenarios)

case	before: shown/dropped (4 runs)	after (4 runs)	CPU ms/frame before → after
VP9 Full	6/186, 53/139, 0/192, 0/192	192/0, 192/0, 189/3, 192/0	23-49 → 75-83
VP9 1/2	6/186, 58/134, 2/190, 52/140	192/0, 191/1, 192/0, 192/0	34-70 → 78-80
HEVC Full	6/186, 1/191, 0/192, 9/183	192/0, 192/0, 192/0, 192/0	74-124 → 91-97
HEVC 1/2	0/192, 9/183, 0/192, 19/173	192/0, 192/0, 192/0, 185/7	64-118 → 94-97
HEVC 1/2 draft	5/187, 88/104, 97/95, 138/54	188/4, 192/0, 187/5, 189/3	135-148 → 96-104
AV1 Full	4/188, 19/173, 0/192, 36/156	52/140, 0/192, 178/14, 0/192	31-47 → 38-56
AV1 1/2	32/160, 44/148, 1/191, 38/154	2/190, 150/42, 184/8, 50/142	30-50 → 41-72
AV1 1/2 draft	1/191, 24/168, 1/191, 27/165	192/0, 187/5, 184/8, 192/0	25-51 → 68-70

CPU per displayed frame rises where the decoder now keeps up: before, most frames were never decoded (dropped jobs cost nothing). At load ~180-220, 4K VP9 and HEVC now play in real time at Full and 1/2; AV1 does at 1/2 with draft decoding and sometimes at 1/2 / Full: its frames decode concurrently only once their references are complete (whole-frame dependencies) and the clip has a single tile, so a 4K frame waits for its references' deblocking, CDEF and output copy.

What M4.10 changed

1. VP9 frame threading (the decoder had none: tile columns, then a loop-filter wavefront, then assembly and output, each a barrier — 14 threads used 40-50 % more cycles than one and barely ran faster). Frames are now published one superblock row at a time once loop filtered; each frame's post stage (band assembly from the tile strips, loop filter in raster order, publication, output picture) runs on its own thread while the next frames' tile columns decode, their motion compensation waiting per band for exactly the reference rows it reads. Backward-adaptive streams only wait for the previous frame's symbol counts.
2. VP9 kernels: the loop filter's lane masks were bools with clamp and branchy selects, which kept it scalar; 0 / -1 integer masks, bitwise selects and min / max make it NEON. The inverse transform's column pass runs the generated butterflies on 4 / 8 columns at once; 8-bit sub-pixel filters accumulate in 16-bit lanes (every VP9 filter sum fits modulo 2^16).
3. HEVC: motion compensation zeroed two 10 KB windows per block (11 % of the time in memset) and filtered with dynamic-width scalar sums; it now reuses scratch windows and filters taps-outer over fixed widths. SAO (20 % of the time) selects edge / band offsets per lane instead of a table lookup per sample. Runs of bypass bins decode with one division; output clipping uses min / max. Frame threading with per-CTB-row waits was already in place.
4. AV1: fixed-width sub-pixel filter passes; frame and tile-region planes recycled through a bounded pool instead of a fresh calloc / munmap per frame (~10 % of the time); palette mode-info arrays (40 bytes per 4x4) only with screen content tools; branch-free CDF update.
5. Draft mode for all three through VideoDecoder::set_draft (Settings ▸ Playback ▸ Draft decoding, reduced-resolution playback only): VP9 frames that refresh no reference slot skip the loop filter; HEVC sub-layer non-reference pictures of the top sub-layer skip deblocking and SAO; AV1 shown frames that refresh no slot skip deblocking, CDEF and loop restoration. Tested per codec (unflagged pictures bit-exact, single- and multi-threaded) and through the media stack (crates/codecs/tests/draft_decoders.rs: draft frames reach draft requests only; an export after draft playback is bit-exact with ffmpeg).

Not done: AV1 row-level frame threading (references are waited for as whole frames) and its per-edge deblocking; VP9 and HEVC coefficient / CABAC parsing are now the largest single costs (~27 %); HEVC reference windows are still copied per block (~11 %).

Results (M4.9: 4K H.264, before → after)

Baseline = commit 3d14099 (M3.12, unchanged decoder); after = M4.9. Interleaved runs on 2026-10-02/03, load average 92–178 (the playback rows say which load each run saw).

Decoder work per frame (load-independent)

h264dec example, one decoder, CPU cycles and instructions counted by the kernel (all threads), output bit-exact with ffmpeg:

stream	Mcycles / frame before	after	after, draft mode
2160p (a2160.mp4, 170 Mbit/s, first 48 frames)	505	390 (−23 %)	356 (−30 %)
1080p (dec_h264_1080.mp4, 120 frames)	132	100 (−24 %)	90 (−32 %)

The cycle count is the same with 1, 4 or 14 frame threads (no spinning or contention overhead): at ~4.5 GHz a 4K frame is ~85 ms of one core, so 23.976 fps needs about two cores.

Decode (every frame through the media stack)

codec	size	CPU ms/frame before (2 rounds)	after (2 rounds)
H.264	1080p	35.8, 39.5	33.0, 29.4
H.264	2160p	138.9, 152.1	125.7, 112.3

(A run at load ~190 before any change gave 41.6 / 160.2 ms; an intermediate build 32.2 / 118.3.)

Cold seeks on the 4K fixture (12 random targets, GOP 250, fresh source per seek)

mode	CPU ms per seek before	after	wall p50 ms before → after
full decode from the keyframe	7529, 7418	5531, 5268 (−27 %)	2757, 1848 → 924, 739
keep 2 s (scrub)	7488, 7373	5442, 5397	2408, 1995 → 872, 795
late (playback catch-up)	5597, 5487	4079, 3949	2014, 1248 → 735, 526

Samples decoded per seek are identical (~48, ~34 in catch-up): the same pictures, decoded with less work. The cold seek is a chain of reference pictures, so it shows the per-picture cost directly.

Program-monitor playback, 2160p (8 s, GPU path)

case	before: shown/dropped (load)	after: shown/dropped (load)	CPU ms/frame before → after
Full	192/0 (92), 9/183 (167)	113/79 (171), 192/0 (139)	159 (no skips), 133 (17 skipped) → 131, 130
1/2	12/180 (95), 5/187 (169)	173/19 (172), 192/0 (124)	143, 127 → 133, 132
1/2 draft	–	183/9 (175), 192/0 (119)	– → 144, 134
1/4	–	186/6 (177), 192/0 (111)	– → 134, 125
1/4 draft	–	192/0 (178), 190/2 (101)	– → 132, 131
1080p Full	192/0, 192/0	192/0, 192/0	41, 48 → 39, 36

Before, the 4K clip kept up in one run (Full at load 92; 1/2 dropped 94 % at load 95) and dropped 95–97 % at load ~168. After, every 4K case plays 192/0 at load 100–140; at load 171–178 Full drops 41 %, 1/2 10 % (5 % with draft decoding), 1/4 3 % (none with draft decoding). CPU per displayed frame (whole process: decode, frame workers, compositing) drops ~15 % where no frames were skipped; draft decoding at 1/2 and 1/4 is within run-to-run noise in this column (its saving is the ~9 % of decoder cycles above, plus a quarter / sixteenth of the texture upload), while the frame jobs wait for the decoder less (decode ms/job 212 → 67 at 1/2, 98 → 44 at 1/4 in the busy round). On an idle machine the 4K clip needs about two cores.

What M4.9 changed

1. Deblocking (25–30 % of 4K decode time before): the edge filter runs on all 16 luma / 8 chroma lines of an edge at once with per-lane masks and min/max clipping (no clamp, whose bounds assert blocked vectorisation), so it compiles to NEON; edges whose alpha or beta index is 0 are skipped. Bit-exact with the per-line filter (random-edge unit test) and ffmpeg.
2. CABAC: decode_decision / decode_bypass select instead of branching on the bin value (the MPS/LPS outcome is close to random at high bit rates), renormalisation has no branch on the range, and context / state indexing has no bounds checks.
3. Inverse transforms: the 4x4 / 8x8 column pass and the add/clip run across all columns.
4. Frame threading was already in place (M2): pictures decode concurrently and wait per macroblock row for the reference rows their motion vectors reach, with deblocking pipelined row by row inside each picture's job. The conformance suite now decodes every fixture with 1, 3 and all threads (bit-exact each time). A separate deblocking thread was not added: a picture's rows are published about two rows after they are reconstructed, so a reference chain advances a few rows behind its predecessor and the pool already has more pictures in flight than cores (crates/h264/README.md, "Threading model").
5. Draft decoding (Settings ▸ Playback ▸ Draft decoding, off by default; perf.stats playback.draftDecode, decode.draftFrames, decode.h264Threads): while the Program monitor plays at 1/2 or 1/4, H.264 non-reference pictures skip deblocking (no other picture can change), and draft plans hand the GPU box-decimated Y'CbCr planes at the drawn size. Draft frames carry their own frame-cache keys and the GOP cache serves them to draft requests only, so pausing, rendering and exporting always decode exact pictures (tested through the media stack against ffmpeg after draft playback). The CPU renderer already converted reduced-resolution frames straight to the decimated size (to_linear_f32_decimated).

Not done: CABAC residual decoding (now 41 % of the work, ~19 cycles per bin) is inherently serial; the remaining deblocking cost is mostly the vertical-edge transposes; motion compensation and the per-row / per-picture copies (4 %) are unchanged.

Results (M4.8, before → after)

Baseline = commit 457aca1 (the harness on unchanged code); after = M4.8. Runs alternated base / after (2 rounds each, 2026-10-02).

Decode (every frame through the media stack: container, GOP cache, decoder, conversion)

CPU ms per frame (both rounds; lower is better). fps is the best of the run at that moment's load.

codec	size	CPU ms/frame before	after	fps before → after (same-round pairs)
H.264	1080p	43.4 / 43.7	48.2 / 46.1	101, 105 → 51, 34 (load 99 → 127)
H.264	2160p	169 / 166	171 / 178	17, 31 → 16, 9
HEVC	1080p	80.5 / 76.4	31.4 / 34.5	25, 58 → 69, 41
HEVC	2160p	325 / 314	122 / 136	8.2, 12 → 17, 11
VP9	1080p / 2160p	39.7 / 137.6	36.5 / 136.8	18 / 12 → 18 / 7.8
AV1	1080p / 2160p	20.2 / 78.2	19.7 / 72.6	106 / 23 → 50 / 9.4
ProRes 422 HQ	1080p / 2160p	23.6 / 89.0	23.2 / 86.7	59 / 28 → 34 / 15

On a quieter moment earlier in the session (load ~70) the same binaries decoded H.264 at 100 fps (1080p) / 24 fps (2160p), AV1 131 / 44 fps and ProRes 202 / 49 fps.

Seeking (cold seek through the media stack, 12 random targets, modes interleaved, load ~150)

fixture (GOP 250)	full decode from keyframe	skip non-reference > 2 s before (scrub)	skip all late non-reference (playback catch-up)
H.264 1080p	1405 ms, 3.3 s CPU	1276 ms, 3.1 s CPU	789 ms, 2.3 s CPU
H.264 2160p	3394 ms, 8.5 s CPU	2828 ms, 8.4 s CPU	2274 ms, 6.3 s CPU
HEVC 2160p	4091 ms, 17.8 s CPU	3058 ms, 12.3 s CPU	2512 ms, 9.8 s CPU

The target frame is identical in every mode (only pictures nothing references are left out).

Program-monitor playback (8 s, GPU path)

scenario	shown/dropped before	after	CPU ms/frame before → after	non-ref samples skipped
H.264 1080p	192/0, 192/0	191/1, 191/1	55 → 55	0 (keeps up)
3 × 1080p stacked	192/0, 190/2	188/4, 185/7	120 → 128	0
H.264 2160p Full	22/170, 192/0	0/192, 0/192	183 → 87	39–52
H.264 2160p Half	180/12, 192/0	0/192, 0/192	198 → 102	46–49
HEVC 2160p Full	0/192, 0/192	0/192, 0/192	164 → 90	88
HEVC 2160p Half	0/192, 0/192	0/192, 0/192	160 → 97	33–92

Shown/dropped at 2160p is decided by the load at the moment (base round 2 happened to play 192/0 at a quiet minute; a later three-way run at load 175–195 gave 0–21 shown for every binary, and 143/49 for HEVC once). CPU per displayed second halved at 2160p: frames that are already late are no longer fully decoded, and HEVC decodes 2.5× cheaper.

Scrubbing (24 random seeks + 8 playhead drags through the monitor's request path)

scenario	seek p50 / p95 ms before	after	drag-stop p50 ms before → after
H.264 1080p	357 / 940, 582 / 1535	840 / 1567, 770 / 1389	27, 62 → 281, 103
H.264 2160p	1063 / 2377, 1499 / 3028	2445 / 5357, 2390 / 4562	288, 513 → 560, 834
HEVC 2160p	130 / 4100 (9 timeouts), 318 / 1397	2466 / 6441, 2476 / 7596 (0 timeouts)	9, 3872 → 462, 1893

These runs coincided with load rising from 99 to 170 for "after". A later interleaved three-way run (base / after with catch-up disabled / after) at load 80–200 gave H.264 1080p seek p50 345 / 712 / 572 ms then 379 / 389 / 461 ms, and H.264 2160p 913 / 1312 / 2105 then 1946 / 931 / 840 ms: within the noise. The cold-seek table above is the load-independent comparison.

Timeline UI (1000 clips on 20 tracks, 1920×1080 window, egui_kittest)

view	update p50 / p95 ms before	after	tessellate p50 ms	wgpu render p50 ms (incl. readback)	vertices
fit (all 1000 clips)	3.1 / 4.9, 3.4 / 5.7	2.9 / 4.5, 2.9 / 3.3	0.3	15	35.7 k
zoomed, scrolling	2.8 / 3.8, 2.8 / 4.8	2.9 / 4.9, 2.6 / 6.8	0.2	15	29.2 k

The timeline is not a bottleneck: the whole app frame (all panels) costs ~3 ms with 1000 clips visible; it already culls clips outside the view. The waveform display gain no longer rescans the whole source's peaks for every clip every frame (cached per peak list).

Export (8 s of 1080p23.976 H.264 + AAC source)

format	fps before → after	CPU ms/frame before → after
H.264 + AAC	10.6, 5.8 → 10.2, 11.9	256 → 250
ProRes 422	4.7, 3.0 → 6.3, 9.6	249 → 232

Profile (sample): H.264 export is ~45 % encoder, ~30 % decoding the noisy 45 Mbit/s source, ~25 % CPU compositing; ProRes export spends most in prores::encode::slice_bits / choose_quantisers (rate search), then source decode and compositing. Not changed in M4.8.

Project save / open (5 sequences × 1000 clips, 3.7 MB)

save 24 / 68 → 36 / 21 ms, open 26 / 82 → 21 / 19 ms (p50 of 3; noise).

Peak RSS per section (MB)

decode 2642 / 2925 → 2506 / 2064; playback 5246 / 7903 → 3379 / 3121; scrub 4205 / 5022 → 5390 / 4183; timeline 626 / 650 → 660 / 675; export 2367 / 2286 → 2606 / 2619; project 114 / 136 → 124 / 133.

What M4.8 changed

1. HEVC inverse transform (largest hotspot: >50 % of HEVC decode CPU). Sums contiguous basis rows scaled by non-zero coefficients, size as a const generic so loops vectorise; bit-exact (exact integer sums), tested against the direct matrix product on random blocks and by the ffmpeg conformance fixtures. SAO edge offset gets a check-free inner loop. HEVC CPU per frame −60 %.
2. No redundant plane copies: H.264 / HEVC / VP9 pictures are moved into VideoFrames instead of copied (12 MB per 2160p frame; HEVC 10-bit also lost a per-sample widening pass).
3. Catch-up decoding: frame jobs carry how far before their frame the playhead is (filmcraft_media::cancel::with_catch_up); the GOP cache skips non-reference samples of late frames (VideoDecoder::is_disposable: H.264 nal_ref_idc 0, HEVC sub-layer non-reference pictures of the top temporal layer). Scrub requests keep the last 2 s fully decoded so dragging back stays cached. The wanted frame is decoded exactly as before; a later request for a skipped frame re-seeks. ~50 % of the fixtures' pictures are non-reference.
4. perf.stats (engine query + UI/control method): decode counters (cache hit rate, seeks, samples decoded / skipped, decoder ms), playback shown / dropped, frame-worker decode / render ms (p50 / p95), request hit rate, cache use, UI fps, process CPU.
5. Timeline: waveform source peak cached.

Not feasible / not done: reduced-resolution decode for H.264 / HEVC (inter prediction needs full-resolution references, so it cannot be bit-exact; ½/¼ playback already decimates after decode); AV1 internals untouched (measured only); export encoders not optimised.