Blu-Ray 3D for LLano? (EDITED) Nor for Zacate?

[VirtualLarry]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4479/amd-a83850-an-htpc-perspective/6

"The only puzzling aspect is the missing ModeH264MVC_VLD_Avivo entry which is present in the AMD 6xxx cards with UVD3. Instead, we have ModeH264_VLD_Multiview_Avido, which means that the Blu-ray players will have to interface with this new entry. AMD let us know that the 6550D doesn't have full hardware acceleration for 3D Blu-Rays. Some sort of extra assistance from the host CPU will be needed."

This sucks. First, Zacate doesn't have enough "oomph" for Blu-Ray 3D, even though it has UVD3 supposedly, and now we fine out LLano doesn't either.

This is going to kill LLano for a lot of HTPC setups, IMHO, at least for people that want to be future-proof for Blu-Ray 3D.

Edit: I read further into the review, and it looks like they tested a 3D blu-ray.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4479/amd-a83850-an-htpc-perspective/8

 

[Spikesoldier]

It's surprising to me that Llano wouldnt have enough CPU power to push the 3D Blu Ray despite not having hardware acceleration.

 

[Arkaign]

It's surprising to me that Llano wouldnt have enough CPU power to push the 3D Blu Ray despite not having hardware acceleration.

It does, the OP is just saying that for whatever reason the HW acceleration tags or whatever aren't there for the llano drivers, if I understand it correctly. It seems to work though, so I don't think it'll be a big deal either way.

 

[Spikesoldier]

It does, the OP is just saying that for whatever reason the HW acceleration tags or whatever aren't there for the llano drivers, if I understand it correctly. It seems to work though, so I don't think it'll be a big deal either way.

I saw in the article just now. Hopefully they will patch it and also fix the local file playback in next month's driver release.

 

[Idontcare]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4479/amd-a83850-an-htpc-perspective/6

"The only puzzling aspect is the missing ModeH264MVC_VLD_Avivo entry which is present in the AMD 6xxx cards with UVD3. Instead, we have ModeH264_VLD_Multiview_Avido, which means that the Blu-ray players will have to interface with this new entry. AMD let us know that the 6550D doesn't have full hardware acceleration for 3D Blu-Rays. Some sort of extra assistance from the host CPU will be needed."

This sucks. First, Zacate doesn't have enough "oomph" for Blu-Ray 3D, even though it has UVD3 supposedly, and now we fine out LLano doesn't either.

This is going to kill LLano for a lot of HTPC setups, IMHO, at least for people that want to be future-proof for Blu-Ray 3D.

Edit: I read further into the review, and it looks like they tested a 3D blu-ray.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4479/amd-a83850-an-htpc-perspective/8

Maybe I am misunderstanding how this works, but I took from the AT comment that while the dGPU on Llano itself is not powerful enough to handle the bitstream in realtime the CPU itself is more than capable of shouldering the necessary workload and as such the product itself is capable of handling Blu-ray.

Is this not the case?

If it is the case, that workload sharing between dGPU and the llano CPU cores gets the job done, is there some sort of unacceptable downside to this? (too much power consumption or something?)

 

[Arkadrel]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4479/amd-a83850-an-htpc-perspective/6

"The only puzzling aspect is the missing ModeH264MVC_VLD_Avivo entry which is present in the AMD 6xxx cards with UVD3. Instead, we have ModeH264_VLD_Multiview_Avido, which means that the Blu-ray players will have to interface with this new entry. AMD let us know that the 6550D doesn't have full hardware acceleration for 3D Blu-Rays. Some sort of extra assistance from the host CPU will be needed."

This sucks. First, Zacate doesn't have enough "oomph" for Blu-Ray 3D, even though it has UVD3 supposedly, and now we fine out LLano doesn't either.

This is going to kill LLano for a lot of HTPC setups, IMHO, at least for people that want to be future-proof for Blu-Ray 3D.

Edit: I read further into the review, and it looks like they tested a 3D blu-ray.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4479/amd-a83850-an-htpc-perspective/8

3D Blu-ray Playback CPU Load

We saw in one of the previous sections that the 6550D doesn't have the same MVC decode feature of the 6xxx GPUs. We took the 3D Blu-ray version of Alice in Wonderland for a spin and played it on the 6550D as well as the 6570 (not in CrossFire mode). As expected, the 6570 had marginally lesser CPU utilization. The GPU load (not recorded here) was also lesser compared to the 6550D (that is to be expected because of the difference in the DRAM and GPU core clocks). We also recorded the CPU load while playing a 2D Blu-ray (HQV Benchmark) on the 6550D. It gives an indication of the CPU assistance required by the 3D Blu-rays.

Blu-ray Playback CPU Usage:
Alice in Wonderland [3D] (6550D) 21%
Alice in Wonderland [3D] (Sapphire 6570) 16%
HQV 2.0 Benchmark Blu-ray [2D] (6550D) 12%

It seems like its able to do so by use of the CPU.
Yes it can use upto 21% of the CPU to do so, but it gets the job done.

 

[gevorg]

Meh, I really don't care about 3D in HTPC setup, or 3D in general.

 

[notty22]

I thought you needed a dedicated hardware solution for 3d blu ray to, but I guess you don't. Here is a good primer.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/blu-ray-3d-3d-video-3d-tv,2632-10.html

Blu-ray 3D movie titles will contain two full Blu-ray quality video streams, one for each eye. Decoding a Blu-ray 3D is comparable to decoding two standard Blu-ray movies at the same time. While it would be reasonable to expect that the video file size and bit rate would double (since the number of decoded frames doubles), there are some efficiencies in a 3D video that can be taken advantage of. Since each eye is seeing a slightly different perspective of the same scene, there are many similarities in the frames of video for the left and right eyes.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, it looks like I read the initial part of the article wrong at first. I thought that they were saying that it wouldn't do Blu-Ray 3D, but then the later page in the article says that they tested it, with 21% CPU usage. Which really, isn't too bad.

So even though the graphics drivers don't fully offload the Blu-Ray 3D playback, it appears that LLano as a whole is still capable of it, which is indeed better than the Zacate situation. (It has been reported by users that Zacate isn't truely capable of Blu-Ray 3D, due to underpowered CPU.)

 

[Schmide]

As I understand it, we're just seeing players come out that can do true 1080p 3d. Most content is still compressed at half resolution (i.e. 2x 960x1080 or 2x 1280x720)

In terms of pixels per frame

1x 1920x1080 = 2,457,600 = 2x 960x1080 > 2x 1280x720 = 1,843,200 > 1280x720 = 921,600.

So for now the pixel rate for 3d is less than or equal the pixel rate for 1080p. I don't know the actual bitrate needed for 3d but I imagine it should be doable on Zacate.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Blu-Ray is already a niche market, and the people who are in it that care about 3D are probably under 5% of them. Most of them are either indifferent or don't like it. Don't know how this is a big issue. There's almost no 3D content.

Well, except this isn't an issue. It cannot be offloaded to the IGP completely, so it takes a bit of CPU power. It definitely works, though.

 

[Topweasel]

Blu-Ray is already a niche market, and the people who are in it that care about 3D are probably under 5% of them. Most of them are either indifferent or don't like it. Don't know how this is a big issue. There's almost no 3D content.

Well, except this isn't an issue. It cannot be offloaded to the IGP completely, so it takes a bit of CPU power. It definitely works, though.

I wouldn't call Blu-Ray niche. But yeah for the most part, of the users of BD the amount of them driven to 3d is ridicouly small. For Videophiles, its detested for the most part, and they are usually the ones championing for media to maintain the directors vision.

 

[notty22]

Movies like Tron Legacy will bring more interest in to 3d blu ray. I saw it 3d imax, and reviews of the 3d blu ray ( in optimum hardware i'm sure) are excellent.

 

[Topweasel]

Movies like Tron Legacy will bring more interest in to 3d blu ray. I saw it 3d imax, and reviews of the 3d blu ray ( in optimum hardware i'm sure) are excellent.

Accept there it is probably the worst movie in terms of 3d of all 3d movies.


The other problem with 3d is the success of this stuff has typically been enthusiast purchasing enough to allow that market to mature before the equipment is purchased by the general users. But right now people with money going for a "gimmick" are jumping on this, not the enthusiasts. Problem with Novelty purchases is, people only make so many of them. I expect it to have long legs in the theaters but I expect an eventual death within the next 4 years after software sales continue to lag hardware sales.

 

[nenforcer]

I own an ATOM 330 + nVidia ION 1 based board and I'm not sure it's capable of Bluray 3D since it's basically a Geforce 9400GT based GPU. The ION2 GT218 based GPU is however, HDMI 4.1 and Bluray 3D capable. These are from 2009 and 2010, respectively.

I'd be very surprised if Zacate, released in what January of 2011 was not Bluray 3D capable.

BTW I paid to see Tron Legacy in 3D at IMAX and was totally disappointed. I haven't been back to see a "3D" film since that one last December. There was something like 10 minutes of actual 3D footage.

 

[busydude]

Tron is meh.. Avatar is still the best implementation of 3D in a movie.

 

[Ryan Smith]

Just to add some technical insight to this thread, the UVD block on Llano is almost but not quite UVD 3. All the additions from UVD 2.x to UVD 3 are there except for the addition of MVC support (and for this reason I don't know why AMD is still calling it UVD).

Now the good news is that MVC is basically an elementary H.264 stream and then a secondary delta stream for the right eye. I'm not sure how AMD is doing the codec plumbing, but at the end of the day based on our data they're clearly sending the H.264 stream through their hardware decoder. The only work the CPU is doing is handling the secondary stream, which is why there's only a CPU hit of around %5 (around 20% of a single core).

The only real downside is that this isn't a driver issue, but rather a bona fide hardware problem. Llano simply doesn't have a decoder block for that secondary stream. So this isn't something that can be fixed in Llano; Trinity will be AMD's chance to resolve it.