You simply turn off all the tools that are slow, and you end up with an AV1 encode that is very fast, but quality wont be anywhere close to your normal AV1 encode.

I don't doubt it will be of higher quality than AVC. After all AVC was the work started pre 2000 and published in 2003.

It is easy to dismiss what Cisco demonstrated like this, but if you listen to the talk, they argue that having more tools available gives you more room to optimize for quality per bit per cycle, in the same way that having more choices allows you to optimize better for just quality per bit (or any other objective, really). So it's not just a matter of turning things off, but of making good choices.

It is also not just beating AVC. They claim that it is higher quality than their own HEVC work, which they invested in heavily before it become clear that the licensing situation was not going to just "work itself out". They once told us that even they were surprised how many of the HEVC tools you could wind up using for real time, if you used them judiciously (basically: all of them).

I have worked with some of the team responsible for this project before, and we collaborated with them on some AV1 tools (most notably the CDEF loop filter, but also entropy coding and a few other things). They know their stuff, and really do seem to be leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else on the RTC side of things.

Two important things it will be:

  1) Royalty (and annoying patent) free.
  2) A reason for hardware decoders to exist.

....Or having a PC roughly 157x faster.

I encoded about 100 1080p-sized images to AVIF yesterday. I was a little disappointed that each of them were taking about 30 seconds, fully loading an i7-2600 CPU. Realtime AV1 encoding is good news, maybe those optimizations can reach the still image format?

Your CPU is missing AVX2 & AVX512 (and numerous other CPU extensions), the amount of optimiztion that can happen for your CPU is limited.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions

You should open an issue, the fix might be as simple as changing your build flags.