Memory Assessment of Versatile Video Coding

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the memory requirements of Versatile Video Coding (VVC) compared to HEVC, revealing significantly higher memory usage and access demands, especially in inter-prediction, due to new coding unit sizes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive memory analysis of VVC, highlighting the increased memory demands and the impact of new coding features compared to HEVC.

Findings

VVC uses up to 13.4x more memory than HEVC.

Inter-prediction consumes 60%-90% of encoder memory in VVC.

VVC requires up to 5.3x more memory accesses, with 23% due to larger CU sizes.

Abstract

This paper presents a memory assessment of the next-generation Versatile Video Coding (VVC). The memory analyses are performed adopting as a baseline the state-of-the-art High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The goal is to offer insights and observations of how critical the memory requirements of VVC are aggravated, compared to HEVC. The adopted methodology consists of two sets of experiments: (1) an overall memory profiling and (2) an inter-prediction specific memory analysis. The results obtained in the memory profiling show that VVC access up to 13.4x more memory than HEVC. Moreover, the inter-prediction module remains (as in HEVC) the most resource-intensive operation in the encoder: 60%-90% of the memory requirements. The inter-prediction specific analysis demonstrates that VVC requires up to 5.3x more memory accesses than HEVC. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that up to 23% of such growth is due to VVC novel-CU sizes (larger than 64x64).