ATI AVIVO and H264

[rbV5]

In a an interview that appeared on TGdaily.com, Link Godfrey Cheng, ATI's Director of Marketing, for Multimedia Products was asked:

TG Daily: Will all new cards of the Radeon family be able to play H.264 compressed HD content at this bitrate?

Cheng: We are still tweaking the finals. Certainly, with the R520 [X1800XT] you will be able to do up to 1080p [1920x1080 pixels]. If you look at the other cards, the RW530 [X1600XT] will be able to do at least 720p [1280 x 720 pixel]. We are focusing the R515 [X1300] solution on the FD [filler data] resolution of H.264.

I am hoping for a robust H264 decoding solution, but if X1600XT is going to be perhaps struggling to decode 1080p (no small task decoding 1080p H264 @ 40Mbit per second for perspective) I certainly wouldn't give it much hope for serious "encoding" support, and the X1300

We are focusing the R515 [X1300] solution on the FD [filler data] resolution of H.264.

LOL, what the heck does that mean?

I know with WMV HD, my Xpress200 onboard graphics doesn't have the processing power to provide an adequate assist for 1080p WMV HD decoding, but the X800XL and AIW9700pro have plenty to drop the CPU requirement probably at least 600MHz or so(AMD) from the 2.4 GHz it takes to decode the most demanding titles in software without dropping frames. I'm hoping for much better on H264 as I believe it will gain a larger acceptance much faster than WMV HD ever hoped for.

 

[forumposter32]

It means this:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2551

ATI's Avivo was already compared to Nvidia's Purevideo and Purevideo won. They said future driver revisions could change that although I'm still dissapointed. ATI's web site section on Avivo looks like a LIE compared to what you get.

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: forumposter32
It means this:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2551

ATI's Avivo was already compared to Nvidia's Purevideo and Purevideo won. They said future driver revisions could change that although I'm still dissapointed. ATI's web site section on Avivo looks like a LIE compared to what you get.

What does Anand's review of deinterlacing have to do with my thread? I'm talking about AVIVO and H264 decoding and the interview with ATI's Godfrey Cheng and about the capabilities of the different ATI cards. There is another thread to discuss Anand's review.

 

[xtknight]

filler data? wtf lol.

So it looks like ATI has not only paper-launched the H.264 stuff, but also castrated it on the lower-end cards. That's kind of lame. The X1600 and X1300 were perfect low-profile for HTPCs then they neuter the decoding on them. Hopefully there will still be enough graphics horsepower+CPU horsepower=realtime 1080i/60 decoding.

As a side note there are already other GPU-accelerated video functions:
Check out fft3dGPU, the GPU-ized version of fft3dfilter. They're AVISynth plugins.

Also this might help encoding if ATI doesn't deliver their encoding acceleration promise. It's just a math acceleration kind of thing.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1867123,00.asp

 

[Duvie]

That is lame cause I was hoping maybe for an AIW of the x1600 range for stuff like this.....It was going to be my multimedia PVR all in one solution and my Nvidia 6800 quadro'd would be my CAD workstation...Both will be X2's though...

 

[xtknight]

Well that's interesting...maybe if there's an AIW version of the X1600 they will implement the decoding full-throttle vs. the lowly default X1600.

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Well that's interesting...maybe if there's an AIW version of the X1600 they will implement the decoding full-throttle vs. the lowly default X1600.

I don't think its a matter of being "Full-throttle" or not. I think its a matter of the hardware itself being powerful enough. Clearly, if performance is different accross the product lines, it's probably due to the differences in the core.

It could also very well be that X1600 will be able to properly decode 1080p, as Cheng did say "at least" 720p. Hopefully that means that when matched with a decent CPU, it could handle 1080p. Hopefully, we will soon see.

The CPU does play a major role with ATI hardware decoding since, while MPEG decoding is part f the GPU's core functionality, divx, real and wmv have used the shader pipeline to accelerate video decoding and assist MPEG encoding, it appears that H264 decding will be similar.

Not, that its bad, it actually works very well and ATI's programmable core does allow them to add functionality, but again it means video decoding will have different video performance just like they have different 3D performance. While someone buying a low-end card likely doesn't expect awesome 3D performance, they very well may expect the full video feature set....it means I won't be interested in X1300 at all, and perhaps even X1600 won't be adequate either.

 

[Wreckage]

It will be nice when a lot of H.264 content becomes available. (even if it's just movie trailers).