H264 support on Radeon X1950 XT?

[UzairH]

I have a X1950 XT (sapphire) and a sinlge core (!) Athlon at 2.2 GHz. When I run hi-def avi and matroska files in VLC media player, they run as slow as molasses, and it is apparent to me that the GPU is not doing any of the video decoding and poor li'l CPU is not up to the task at all. Does the X1950 have any support for this acceleration, and if so what software do I need to enable that / view the videos in? Thanks for the help!

 

[error8]

From what I know the X1950 doesn't support this type of acceleration, only from HD 2600 series and up. You should try to overclock the cpu and see if it gets better, but it is really odd that it can't decode those files. I had a 3000+ athlon64 overclocked to 2,7 ghz and hi-def files worked like a charm.

 

[daveybrat]

Unfortuntately, the 1900 series does not support Unified Video Decoder (UVD).

Only the 2000 (except the 2900) and 3000 series of ATI cards support this feature of high definition decoding on the GPU.

Might be good to try to sell your x1950 and maybe buy a HD 3850 or 3870 instead? Better gaming power and UVD built-in.

 

[BassBomb]

I used nVidia pure video with my 6600GT and 7900GS that worked great

 

[BoboKatt]

From my experience, I was running my HTPC using an ATI x1950XT crossfire main card. I was using PowerDVD Ultra (whatever the latest version). It recognized my ATI and enabled Avivo within the program. I could run 1080p avi or actual BD or HD rips like a dream on my 42" LCD TV with DVI-HDMI video out and Optical audio out from the onboard mobo to my receiever. Never a lag, smooth as butter.

I realize however, that I was using an AMD x2 4800+ for this.. however it was the smoothest thing out there. I no longer use this setup but I wish I would have chekced my CPU usage while watching one of these movies for you to determine if the video card was doing most of the work or not.

 

[v8envy]

If you look at the specs for your card you will find: Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding

Even the X1800XT cards offer the CPU some help. Not as much as the HD series cards which pretty much do all of the work including decryption, but enough for a 2 ghz CPU to play back an HD disk. The caveat is 1. you have to be running on windows 2. you have to be using a player which knows about Avivo.

If you're just using VLC you're likely just using nothing but CPU. A K7 at 2.2 ghz (nice OC!) isn't gonna do it. A 2.4 ghz K8 could *almost* do it.

Also, a big component here is audio decoding. If you're using on-board sound that's just one more drop in the bucket.

 

[zephyrprime]

The x1000 series does support some h.264 decoding but the problem is that you need to have the powerdvd h.264 codec installed to use it because that's the only codec that supports ATI's h.264 acceleration features. I've tested this before on my 1900gt and it works. The problem is, a lot of codecs that you can download (like ffdshow) has no hardware support and only supports software decoding. MS's codecs only support hardware mpeg1&2 decoding.

 

[UzairH]

Wow guys, thanks for the responses, really appreciate you all taking the time to help me out. I have read up a bit on VLC's forums and it seems it does not support GPU acceleration for now. I will explore playback software which does, I tried PowerDVD but that was unable to open the 1080p matroska file