  This work presents algorithms for the efficient implementation of
discontinuous Galerkin methods with explicit time stepping for acoustic wave
propagation on unstructured meshes of quadrilaterals or hexahedra. A crucial
step towards efficiency is to evaluate operators in a matrix-free way with
sum-factorization kernels. The method allows for general curved geometries and
variable coefficients. Temporal discretization is carried out by low-storage
explicit Runge-Kutta schemes and the arbitrary derivative (ADER) method. For
ADER, we propose a flexible basis change approach that combines cheap face
integrals with cell evaluation using collocated nodes and quadrature points.
Additionally, a degree reduction for the optimized cell evaluation is presented
to decrease the computational cost when evaluating higher order spatial
derivatives as required in ADER time stepping. We analyze and compare the
performance of state-of-the-art Runge-Kutta schemes and ADER time stepping with
the proposed optimizations. ADER involves fewer operations and additionally
reaches higher throughput by higher arithmetic intensities and hence decreases
the required computational time significantly. Comparison of Runge-Kutta and
ADER at their respective CFL stability limit renders ADER especially beneficial
for higher orders when the Butcher barrier implies an overproportional amount
of stages. Moreover, vector updates in explicit Runge--Kutta schemes are shown
to take a substantial amount of the computational time due to their memory
intensity.
