ATI is just as bad as NVidia - flash 10.1 and older cards

[coolVariable]

I just did a test with the Avatar trailer. My desktop has a Core i5-750 with a Radeon HD 3870.

Flash 1080p from Youtube: 15-20% CPU usage, looks like a pile of crap.

H.264 (.mov) from Apple website, played with WMP: 0-1% CPU usage, almost BluRay quality.


HTML5 is gonna replace Flash soon anyways, good riddance.

True BUT: that Flash 1080p video is also h.264 encoded.
Just sloppy programming that it doesn't use the GPU for decoding!!!
And I would argue it goes from sloppy to [criminal?] when one considers that the old 9.11 drivers supported some flash acceleration which was removed ... since the cards do support h.264 hardware acceleration there really is no reason why they don't get flash hardware accel.

 

[Skurge]

Well it is relevant to the thread topic. Much better than starting a new thread.

The 1st part was, the 2nd part wasn't.

I guess I should have been clear.

 

[Arkaign]

People who usually have less than 2-year old hardware in their systems aren't affected by this kind of stuff. Those that do use things a little longer (or repurpose old hardware for friends/family/extra pcs) are probably better off using Nvidia, as they definitely support hardware for longer. I bought my dad an X1900 AIW card for quite a lot of $ a few years back, and the support and software with it was pretty bad. Don't get me wrong, I love my 5770, but this is one minor area where Nvidia clearly works harder. G80 is what, 4 years old or more now? Still they work around and make this work.

 

[formulav8]

but this is one minor area where Nvidia clearly works harder. G80 is what, 4 years old or more now? Still they work around and make this work.

Theres a reason it Appears that nVidia supports their hardware longer. Its because their NEW products are rebadges of their OLD products. Since their NEW products uses 3-4 year old gpu cores of course the original 3-4 year old video card will work with whatever the new card supports since they still sell the same old gpu as a new line of video cards. It goes hand in hand.

 

[dguy6789]

Theres a reason it Appears that nVidia supports their hardware longer. Its because their NEW products are rebadges of their OLD products. Since their NEW products uses 3-4 year old gpu cores of course the original 3-4 year old video card will work with whatever the new card supports since they still sell the same old gpu as a new line of video cards. It goes hand in hand.

This. Since Nvidia actively produces what is effectively die shrunk G80s still today, of course they work on drivers for it. ATI stopped producing X1900s and 2900s a very long time ago.

 

[Scali]

There is no die-shrunk G80.
G92 is a slightly different architecture, and one of the main differences is improved video acceleration logic.

 

[formulav8]

G92 is very close to a rebadge and die shrink of G80. minor little differences...

 

[Arkaign]

Theres a reason it Appears that nVidia supports their hardware longer. Its because their NEW products are rebadges of their OLD products. Since their NEW products uses 3-4 year old gpu cores of course the original 3-4 year old video card will work with whatever the new card supports since they still sell the same old gpu as a new line of video cards. It goes hand in hand.

Although that is a decent point, it's not exactly the comprehensive truth. The age of G80-G92 and their viability is due to there being such a long gap before it was really challenged with competition. Even today a 8800GTX/Ultra is a decent gaming card at say 1680x1050 with pretty good settings on new/recent games. For most of Nvidia's history they haven't kept such old designs going for sooooo long.

GF6 series is really old, but I can go to Nvidia.com right now and get current Win7 32-Bit/64-Bit drivers (v258.96). They haven't mfg GF6 in quite a while.

ATI X800/850 is equally ancient, but going to their support page basically tells me that I have to use very old driver versions, that the cards aren't supported in Win7, and this even applies to X1800/X1900/etc which competed with GF7 series.

This of course doesn't matter for 99% of us, but it's nice to see better support for the legacy stuff. Makes supporting old systems and hand-me-down hardware less difficult for sure.

 

[Phynaz]

GF6 series is really old, but I can go to Nvidia.com right now and get current Win7 32-Bit/64-Bit drivers (v258.96). They haven't mfg GF6 in quite a while.

You're assuming that the current Nvidia drivers actually do anything for those old cards. They could consist of three year old legacy code compiled into the new driver set with absolutely no changes to the GF6 driver code.

 

[Scali]

G92 is very close to a rebadge and die shrink of G80. minor little differences...

No, pretty large differences.
It also has a considerably more advanced Cuda computing model, for example.
And the memory interface has been redesigned from 384-bit to 256-bit with little or no impact on performance in practice.
G92 is more closely related to G84 than to G80.
See the specs here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8_series#Technical_summary
If G92 is just a die-shrink of G80, then how come it has about 70 million transistors more, despite having less ROPs and a smaller memory bus?

 

[Arkaign]

You're assuming that the current Nvidia drivers actually do anything for those old cards. They could consist of three year old legacy code compiled into the new driver set with absolutely no changes to the GF6 driver code.

I'm not assuming anything. My brother in law has a notebook with GF6800 GO, and he's upgraded to 4GB of ram and is now running Windows 7 Home Premium 32-Bit, and running relatively recent games at moderate to low settings with no issues, along with Aero peek / Flip / etc. A few months back I tried to do similar things with a desktop X850XTPE (a much faster card), and the best I could do was get Win7 running with no aero at all using a really old driver for Vista. I think it had to do with the WDDM 1.1 vs. 1.0 that's required for full Win7 support.

The issue isn't necessarily new code optimization, but rather making the cards work with current operating systems. Something as old as a 915G or Nvidia 6100 onboard video will work with Windows 7 with no hiccups, but ATI seemed totally uninterested in getting support for their hardware up to date. There are more than a few people out there with decent enough cards, and if they're not gamers then it sucks for them that they have to upgrade their video cards just to use Win7 properly. Plenty of people wanted to get away from Vista ASAP.

It's not a huge deal, as we are talking about fairly old cards, but it is a distinct difference. An X850 is one holy hell of a lot better than a 6100 or 915, but yet it can't run Windows 7 properly thanks to lack of a driver (AFAIK).

If there's a workaround, I'd be interested to know.

 

[Arkaign]

Btw, I'm not trying to make it sound like I'm bitching about ATI support. Overall I think both ATI and Nvidia do an overall very good job, but it seems Nvidia does indeed do better long-term support. This matters zero to enthusiasts who constantly have recent hardware, but it is a nice touch. Compared to a lot of other makers of hardware (Creative, I'm looking at you), they both are real leaders in the field.

 

[wlee15]

I'm not assuming anything. My brother in law has a notebook with GF6800 GO, and he's upgraded to 4GB of ram and is now running Windows 7 Home Premium 32-Bit, and running relatively recent games at moderate to low settings with no issues, along with Aero peek / Flip / etc. A few months back I tried to do similar things with a desktop X850XTPE (a much faster card), and the best I could do was get Win7 running with no aero at all using a really old driver for Vista. I think it had to do with the WDDM 1.1 vs. 1.0 that's required for full Win7 support.

The issue isn't necessarily new code optimization, but rather making the cards work with current operating systems. Something as old as a 915G or Nvidia 6100 onboard video will work with Windows 7 with no hiccups, but ATI seemed totally uninterested in getting support for their hardware up to date. There are more than a few people out there with decent enough cards, and if they're not gamers then it sucks for them that they have to upgrade their video cards just to use Win7 properly. Plenty of people wanted to get away from Vista ASAP.

It's not a huge deal, as we are talking about fairly old cards, but it is a distinct difference. An X850 is one holy hell of a lot better than a 6100 or 915, but yet it can't run Windows 7 properly thanks to lack of a driver (AFAIK).

If there's a workaround, I'd be interested to know.

Have you tried this driver?

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownlo...px?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.13&lang=English

 

[coolVariable]

Although that is a decent point, it's not exactly the comprehensive truth. The age of G80-G92 and their viability is due to there being such a long gap before it was really challenged with competition. Even today a 8800GTX/Ultra is a decent gaming card at say 1680x1050 with pretty good settings on new/recent games. For most of Nvidia's history they haven't kept such old designs going for sooooo long.

GF6 series is really old, but I can go to Nvidia.com right now and get current Win7 32-Bit/64-Bit drivers (v258.96). They haven't mfg GF6 in quite a while.

ATI X800/850 is equally ancient, but going to their support page basically tells me that I have to use very old driver versions, that the cards aren't supported in Win7, and this even applies to X1800/X1900/etc which competed with GF7 series.

This of course doesn't matter for 99% of us, but it's nice to see better support for the legacy stuff. Makes supporting old systems and hand-me-down hardware less difficult for sure.

Hey - they don't even support it in their 3xxx series cards! Those are hardly ancient!!! 3xxx cards were part of ATI's low budget product line up last year!!!
THAT's what pisses people off! It's not that they don't support GPUs from 5+ years ago but they don't even support GPUs that were sold mainstream 12-18 months ago!

 

[tweakboy]

nVidia has never given me a flash problem. Thank you nor have any of the browsers I use
Chrome 7 IE 9 Firefox 3.6.10 .. soo I dont know man ATI especially is a driver thing ATI's driver team are all interns and have been for past 17 years. Same problems I see now on new GPU gen cards 2d problems same problem with their all in wonder card that many years ago. thx gg and gb

 

[RussianSensation]

I just checked the websites for both firms. I could find the latest Windows 7 64-bit NV drivers for GeForce 6 series, 6100 for example, but anything below and including the ATI X1900 series at most supports Cats 10.2 (Starting with HD2xxx series, you can still get the latest drivers). So it does look like NV is the better option for those who plan on keeping their cards for more than 4-5 years. At the same time, this encourages people with "legacy" hardware to upgrade 😉

Sometimes I find it interesting that people get new cell phones and don't even blink at spending $99-$199 every 2 years to upgrade but when it comes to spending $50-100 to upgrade their computers, say get a new videocard every 4 years, it's the end of the world/Windows sucks/Computers constantly require upgrades, etc. :hmm:

 

[Arkaign]

Have you tried this driver?

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownlo...px?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.13&lang=English

Yeah that's one that I tried, notice it says 'vista32', all of the options I tried going back to some early 9.x revision didn't enable aero/peek/flip/etc in Win7. It still worked okay with videos and stuff, it wasn't the end of the world, though it would have been nice to have it run with full features.

 

[Arkaign]

Hey - they don't even support it in their 3xxx series cards! Those are hardly ancient!!! 3xxx cards were part of ATI's low budget product line up last year!!!
THAT's what pisses people off! It's not that they don't support GPUs from 5+ years ago but they don't even support GPUs that were sold mainstream 12-18 months ago!

Well, that's not exactly what I mean. I wasn't complaining that flash 10.1 h264 accel wasn't there for the card, rather that there being a lack of wddm 1.1 or whatever meaning I can't enable even standard windows 7 aero mode (no transparency/etc) with it, and apparently this is for cards up to the X1950. AFAIK, the 3000 series works completely fine, my notebook has HD3200 and it works fine in Win7 with no troubles.

 

[wlee15]

Well, that's not exactly what I mean. I wasn't complaining that flash 10.1 h264 accel wasn't there for the card, rather that there being a lack of wddm 1.1 or whatever meaning I can't enable even standard windows 7 aero mode (no transparency/etc) with it, and apparently this is for cards up to the X1950. AFAIK, the 3000 series works completely fine, my notebook has HD3200 and it works fine in Win7 with no troubles.

WDDM 1.1 requires a card that supports at least DX10 so both your Geforce 6800 and the X850 will be running WDDM 1.0. Have you checked the Windows 7 troubleshoot control panel? Also check Device Manger to make sure the drivers are actually getting installed.