From what I understand, AV1’s encoding complexity is more like H.265 than H.264. It’d be more appropriate to look at the performance of x265 to see what might be possible.

Current video call applications look like crap

>also most twitch streams

Don't they use hardware encoding when possible? And higher bitrate than video calls.

>do you think software encoders won't get anywhere near x264, which can do it in less than one core?

Not at full quality