i thought the ati x1xxx cards did video acceleration?

[bob4432]

running a 3000venice / 1GB pc3200 / pci-e x1800xt to a 720p 40" LCD and i can't watch a x264 720p video - WTF?? i thought that the x1xxx series did video accleration?? using vlc if it helps. the cpu is pegged @ 100%, so it appears the card is not doing anything - is this normal?

 

[TC91]

i think they only do non-hd format acceleration such as dvd, mpeg, etc

 

[Yuriman]

You should look up CoreAVC, might help?

 

[ther00kie16]

Update VLC or get CCCP. I can play 720p and 1080p with a system that's older than yours. I believe everything below HD2400 and 8500gt didn't have full hardware acceleration.

 

[nonameo]

Shouldn't you theoretically be able to write your own codecs for these devices with brook+ or cuda?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: ther00kie16
Update VLC or get CCCP. I can play 720p and 1080p with a system that's older than yours. I believe everything below HD2400 and 8500gt didn't have full hardware acceleration.

will give it a try, thanks. i have vlc 8.6c and now they are up to 8.6h, so a hopefully that will help. also will give cccp a try too

 

[bob4432]

moving to vlc 8.6h seems to have helped as now it maxed out @ ~ 85-90% peak, but still close.....the cccp drivers didn't help much unfortunately. any other ideas? leaving only 10-15% is a bit close as as soon as it hits 100% cpu it hiccups.

 

[ViRGE]

There are a few separate things going on here, so in no specific order:

1) The X1K cards offered a variable level of acceleration given the task at hand. For MPEG2 it was pretty close to complete offloading, only a few bits were missing. The X1K series in particular offered some of the best acceleration out there for the time. For H.264 however none of the cards that could do only partial acceleration were particularly good, you'd only save 10-25% on your CPU utilization. The point for this being is that you're not going to get tremendously low CPU usage with your X1800XT doing the acceleration.

2) To use the acceleration features, a decoder must know how to use DXVA. Platform specific decoders like PowerDVD's decoder module and Media Player Classic HC's decoder module can do this. Cross platform decoders like VLC (or rather libavcodec) can not. Furthermore libavcodec is particularly poor because it's not multithreaded for H.264. Realistically it can only use a single core plus a few percent from the others.

3) You're just low on CPU power period. VLC's not going to cut it, you can try a DXVA compliant decoder but I don't know how much farther you're going to get. Your best bet may be to try out CoreAVC, a software-only decoder with particularly low CPU usage (in exchange for not-quite-to-spec decoding). You may need to disable deblocking/post-processing to squeeze out enough CPU power.

 

[taltamir]

virge has nailed it. Try media player classic home cinema. If that doesn't do the trick, then you need to upgrade your CPU, or upgrade you GPU... I recommend both. Oh and the ram too... get 4GB instead of 1.

 

[bob4432]

will give it a try w/ the tryouts of coreavc and powerdvd. probably won't be ugrading this rig as it is skt939 and imho no reason to go 4GB - hell my main rig w/ a 2160 @ 3GHz and a 3850 only uses 3GB - running 32bit xp on both machines. one thing i noticed is that certain 720p clips will use more cpu power w/ vlc - why is this? i tried one and it would be at 85-90% w/ a mean of ~70%, but another, again, 720p will only use 55%. guess it is the way it is encoded. even when i watch the clips on my main rig, gpu usage is only 2% or so, so it looks like you are correct virge, no offloading. w/ the prices of todays skt939 dc, i will just wait for a deal on a board and skt775 or am2+ setup and grap 2GB of some ddr2 - no sense in putting in more $$$ into this old thing. will let you know how the other programs work out. thanks for the assistance.

 

[taltamir]

You could always redownload / reencode in MPEG4 instead of 264?

 

[soccerballtux]

Originally posted by: bob4432
one thing i noticed is that certain 720p clips will use more cpu power w/ vlc - why is this? i tried one and it would be at 85-90% w/ a mean of ~70%, but another, again, 720p will only use 55%. guess it is the way it is encoded.

bitrate, compression % too.

 

[Raduque]

CoreAVC will give you the best improvement. I can play high-bitrate (14mbps) 720p x264 on an AXP 2500+ with an ATI 9700Pro.

 

[BassBomb]

If you do as Virge said and Taltamir you will find perfect results

I am using a P4 3.0ghz and a 7900GS and it works fairly well @ 1080p watching x264 encoded file in MPC-HC

 

[bob4432]

ok, just to make sure i do this correctly, and i go the vlc / coreave route, i just install vlc 8.6h, reboot and then install coreavc 1.7.x and reboot and then it is good or do i need to configure vlc? i tried the demo of powerdvd and some of my videos are have the .mkv extension and pdvd doesn't like that - some worked when i changed the extension to .mpeg but i would like this stupid simple. makes me wish i hadn't got rid of my last x2 4200 as w/ that regular vlc 8.6c played w/ the onboard video fine (nvidia 6150 chipset) - the x1800xt doesn't seem to help at all for this, so i will probably sell it....

 

[BassBomb]

The programs that will support hardware decoding for x264/h264 using dxva are MPC-HC and PDVD7

VLC with a different codec will not do what you are trying to do, it will reduce your cpu load a bit but not use the GPU

 

[bob4432]

uuugggghhhh -

Unfortunately the MPC-HC decoder only supports the "bitstream mode" at this stage, which means that only the most recent graphic cards are supported :

ATI Radeon HD series for H.264 and VC-1 decoding

 

[BassBomb]

Originally posted by: bob4432
uuugggghhhh -

Unfortunately the MPC-HC decoder only supports the "bitstream mode" at this stage, which means that only the most recent graphic cards are supported :

ATI Radeon HD series for H.264 and VC-1 decoding

Use MPC-HC program with the PDVD7 codec installed and add that as an external filter and disable the internal one.

This will allow you to use the pdvd7 codec (which is the only codec at the current time to use gpu acceleration for DXVA)

This is how I am doing it

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: bob4432
ok, just to make sure i do this correctly, and i go the vlc / coreave route, i just install vlc 8.6h, reboot and then install coreavc 1.7.x and reboot and then it is good or do i need to configure vlc? i tried the demo of powerdvd and some of my videos are have the .mkv extension and pdvd doesn't like that - some worked when i changed the extension to .mpeg but i would like this stupid simple. makes me wish i hadn't got rid of my last x2 4200 as w/ that regular vlc 8.6c played w/ the onboard video fine (nvidia 6150 chipset) - the x1800xt doesn't seem to help at all for this, so i will probably sell it....

FYI, CoreAVC is a DirectShow codec, only media players that can use DirectShow can access it (basically the same list as those that can use DXVA, since DXVA is a DirectShow feature). So you're going to have to use something like Windows Media Player, MPC, MPC-HC, etc. You can't use VLC with CoreAVC. Your best bet is to just use CoreAVC in conjunction with MPC-HC, and turn off MPC-HC's internal H.264 decoder.

 

[bob4432]

thanks again i normally have the cpu power to do whatever i need or will build whatever i need, but i am so close i don't want to build a new rig i was just going to put up w/ the hiccups every so often w/ the current setup. will try mpc-hc and coreavc and see how that goes. i was going to o/c a bit but this is a cheap ecs m/b, so not sure how that would go, and newegg has skt939 diego 4000s for ~$40, but figure i can hold out until i find a deal on a c2d setup since they are getting "old"