I’ve been doing some encoding with Rav1e recently and noticed weird behavior with quantizer settings.

When encoding HEVC video with CRF settings, the size varied depending from the encoding speeds, sometimes it got a little bigger or smaller.

However with AV1 quantizer settings, the size does not change no matter what speed I encode with (tried with 10 to 3), only the encode quality changes.

It seems to me that Quantizer setting on Rav1e wroks more as a bitrate option, rather than quality metric.

Here are some sample files:

Quantizer at 10: link

Quantizer at 8: link