Having tried AV1, I found that it was worse than h265 for what I use it for: high quality movie encodes.

It doesn’t preserve grain well, and if struggles with maintaining quality in low light scenes.

On top of all of this it tends to be more CPU intensive than h265.

For this testing, I used Handbrakes CPU encoder.

I realise that this is maybe not what AV1 is intended for. It’s probably best suited to making low bitrate streams more tolerable. Maybe AV2 will be better 🤷