HD2600 Pro support for Flash/H264 hw accel?

[VirtualLarry]

Amazon has this card for $30 (256MB) or $40 (512MB). I have a friend using a GeForce 6200 AGP to play games and watch Hulu, and full-screen Hulu performance is poor on his single-core AMD64 3200+. So I was hoping to get him a video card that would accelerate Hulu for him. Will this card do it? I would just get him a 4350 PCI-E or something, but he plays games too, and those generally aren't gaming cards.

I could get him a GT240, but prices on those are rather high, much higher than what he would want to spend on a new video card.

How is this card for light gaming?

Edit: This card has UVD, but not UVD2. Is UVD supported for Flash 10.1 hw accel?
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desk...-2600/Pages/ati-radeon-hd-2600-gpu-specs.aspx

Edit: Found this:
http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=123322
Apparently, even though the HD2600Pro supports UVD and H264 accelleration, this card is unsupported for Flash 10.1 hw acceleration. AMD is limiting support for that feature to HD4K and HD5K series cards. Which strikes me as odd, the newest Cats are for the HD2K and up series. The other issue, apparently, is that the AGP variants are essentially unsupported by newer Cats. Is that still true?

Edit: Found the Catalyst 9.12 AGP Hotfix drivers here:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/CatalystAGPHotfix.aspx

Edit: Well, I ordered three of the 256MB AGP versions. So I'll let you all know definatively if it works for flash acceleration or not in about a week.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I can definatively state that at this time, with Cat 9.12 AGP Hotfix drivers, FLASH 10.1 acceleration is NOT supported by the HD 2600 Pro AGP 8x video card. Shame.

Double-shame that the drivers are unsigned, needing an F8 boot every time, and they don't even work with dual-core computers, you have to disable dual-core support in the BIOS if you want the drivers to load. Totally disgusted with ATI at this moment.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

I hate to hear that as I have an older AGP system I'm toying around with upgrading. Your system doesn't happen to be an Nforce motherboard running Vista would it? Vista + Nforce + X2 CPU + ATI video = broken as far as I've read. Though I've also read Win7 fixed whatever the problem was.

 

[VirtualLarry]

No, the motherboard is not Nforce. It's a 939dual-VSTA, with ULI northbridge and southbridge. Which DOES have a supported AGP 3.0 driver in Win7.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Well I went ahead and ordered one. If I can just get better HD and Boxee performance over my 6800GT I'll be happy. I'm still running XP, hopefully I won't run into any driver issues. This old S939 HTPC wants to stay just one step ahead of total obsoleteness.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I hope that's not a dual-core S939. If it is, you're going to have issues with this card.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

It is, but I haven't heard of any problems in XP.

 

[grpm]

So, someone finally discovered a way to activate hardware acceleration on Flash Player 10.1 with modern drivers? Or this card will continue stuck forever with the Catalyst 9.11? I was planning to buy this card to be able to play HD videos from YouTube, but now I'm not sure. And I'm not a gamer, I'm a programmer, but I would like to watch HD content. Please help

 

[Arkaign]

FWIW, I watch 720p videos on my Turion X2 2.2Ghz notebook w/Radeon HD3200 (somewhat crappy IGP) with no issues. 1080p is slightly choppy, but my resolution is 1366x768 anyway, so it doesn't matter. I had to right-click on a flash video and disable 'hardware acceleration' to make it smooth though. 720p MKVs also are flawless. This is on Win7 Pro x64.

I believe the HD2600 is a bit beefier in raw power than my IGP, so this theoretically should have the same results if you disable HW accel and have a CPU that just isn't terrible.

 

[grpm]

FWIW, I watch 720p videos on my Turion X2 2.2Ghz notebook w/Radeon HD3200 (somewhat crappy IGP) with no issues. 1080p is slightly choppy, but my resolution is 1366x768 anyway, so it doesn't matter. I had to right-click on a flash video and disable 'hardware acceleration' to make it smooth though. 720p MKVs also are flawless. This is on Win7 Pro x64.

I believe the HD2600 is a bit beefier in raw power than my IGP, so this theoretically should have the same results if you disable HW accel and have a CPU that just isn't terrible.

Forget it, I cannot disable hardware acceleration when playing a HD video because my Pentium 4 would melt. The whole idea of that feature it's to drop CPU usage and of course take advantage of the graphics card capabilities. I think that the issue with HD video in Flash Player is a driver problem. If somebody find a fix or something, please let me know. Thanks...