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Myth about ATI cards not handling video playback well?

G

gizbug

Platinum Member
I've been told by a few friends that ATI has serious issues with streaming or playing back any type of video files in windows (ie. 1080p videos, etc). They mentioned this happens when hardware acceleration is enabled.


Is there any fact to this? These people once had ATI cards and now have nVIDIA cards, and can see the improved video playback with the nvidia cards.

Reason I ask is I have an 8800gts looking at upgrading to maybe a 4890.
 
There are no documented issues, They work fine, assuming it's set up properly. Your friends likely didn't do it right if it wasn't playing back properly. I watch 1080p content accelerated on my 4890 very often and it has no problems
 
When I could actually get PowerDVD to work, my 4670 would stream 1080p content no problem. The 7.1 channel audio over HDMI is also a nice feature of 4*** series ATI cards if you can take advantage of it.
 
Not sure. But I will tell you my 4850 generates a shitload of error events when viewing mpgs. And looking it up this is an issue they have known about for years. Though it doesnt appear to actually affect anything.

/shrug
 
Originally posted by: Elfear
When I could actually get PowerDVD to work, my 4670 would stream 1080p content no problem. The 7.1 channel audio over HDMI is also a nice feature of 4*** series ATI cards if you can take advantage of it.
Click to expand...

This is the main reason I go with 4x series video cards. Though I have not completely gotten "audio over HDMI" figured out yet mainly for the lack of a good receiver.

However, I was disappointed when I cannot play back the most demanding 1080p video (BBC planet earth, 1080p version, v1, prelude) smoothly on a HD4830 (running VLC 0.9.x on a E6600 oc to 3.1 - using WinXP). I assume the video accelration is on automatically (if so, I don't know how to do it).

Using CoreAVC with MPC, though, the playback is ok (even for cpu and video card that 2 generations older).

I don't know if it would do better with Nvidia video cards?

(Runing VLC 1.0.x, I can playback the same video pretty smoothly on an i7 (at 4hgz) smoothly on an X-800 class video card. The playback was not smooth when I ran a 3.5g i7 using vlc 0.9.x. )
 
Originally posted by: ectx
This is the main reason I go with 4x series video cards. Though I have not completely gotten "audio over HDMI" figured out yet mainly for the lack of a good receiver.

However, I was disappointed when I cannot play back the most demanding 1080p video (BBC planet earth, 1080p version, v1, prelude) smoothly on a HD4830 (running VLC 0.9.x on a E6600 oc to 3.1 - using WinXP). I assume the video accelration is on automatically (if so, I don't know how to do it).

Using CoreAVC with MPC, though, the playback is ok (even for cpu and video card that 2 generations older).

I don't know if it would do better with Nvidia video cards?

(Runing VLC 1.0.x, I can playback the same video pretty smoothly on an i7 (at 4hgz) smoothly on an X-800 class video card. The playback was not smooth when I ran a 3.5g i7 using vlc 0.9.x. )
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VLC doesn't offer hardware acceleration. That would be your problem.
 
NV is slightly faster in MKV playback but both of the latest generations of cards will play any 1080P content without problems.

http://www.driverheaven.net/re...reviewid=797&pageid=13

However, your core 2 3.0ghz should also easily play any HD 1080P videos without any gpu hardware acceleration. I am pretty sure AVI or MKV 1080p playback won't use more than 50% cpu usage with your system. Do you have any #s for reference?
 
No.

Get software with hardware acceleration or use CoreAVC and just run it through your CPU.

Honestly, I don't understand the whole 2D IQ being better on ATI than nVidia and then nVidia having better video acceleration, I'm not sure where these claims have ever been substantiated on a site that was actually impartial to the green/red guys.
 
AMD's video playback (UVD 2) is excellent. Its default color pallets are 'truer' than that of PureVideo 2, and its engine seems more powerful as well. When I tested HD playback with an HD 4890 I was so impressed that I even took some screenshots.

http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/1540/uvd2.jpg

In the above screenshot, I threw 3 x 1080p clips (Iron Man, The International, and some Japanese anime) and the HD 4890 handled it throughout at its performance 2D clock speed (500MHz). Moving Windows around was somewhat jerky, but I couldn't complain at that point.

NV does have advantage in other areas, though. Outside commercial standards, UVD 2 flat-out refuses to do anything. But apparently NV's drivers are more flexible and open, so it accelerates other standards than just regular stuff. So for folks who want to play 'underground' stuff might prefer PureVideo to UVD.

Edit: The three clips were 1 x m2ts (Blu-Ray rip, avg. 30 Mbps) and 2 x mkv's (avg. 20 Mbps and 12 Mbps)
 
You don't have to pay ATI or nVidia for hardware acceleration, but you may have to pay the video player company for a "deluxe" or "pro" version of a player.
 
Originally posted by: Modular
Originally posted by: RussianSensation
Guys don't you have to pay to get the full features of Pure Video? I recall reading that when I had my 8800GTS.
Click to expand...

Yes, you do.
Click to expand...
You're confusing the old Pure Video DVD software with Pure Video the hardware feature. You don't need the former for the latter. Any software package implementing DXVA (PowerDVD, MPC-HC, Win7) can use the hardware.
 
So you need the right software to take advantage of video acceleration offered by a card? I naively thought it is avaialbe at the driver/os level and thus avaialbe to any video playback. Wishful thinking on my part.

 
Originally posted by: ectx
So you need the right software to take advantage of video acceleration offered by a card? I naively thought it is avaialbe at the driver/os level and thus avaialbe to any video playback. Wishful thinking on my part.
Click to expand...
Think of it this way: If the software doesn't know about the feature, how can it use it?
 
I think he was assuming it worked something like RAID, where higher-layer software doesn't need to know anything about the bits abstracted beneath it. User apps don't know or need to know whether you're using software or hardware RAID (or even that there is a RAID) -- they just interact with the filesystems presented to them by the OS. (It'd be very cool if hardware acceleration worked like that, but I don't know if it does.)
 
Well having recently run both nvidia 8800gts 512 and now a radeon hd 4890 I cannot tell the difference during video playback between the two.
 
Originally posted by: deimos3428
I think he was assuming it worked something like RAID, where higher-layer software doesn't need to know anything about the bits abstracted beneath it. User apps don't know or need to know whether you're using software or hardware RAID (or even that there is a RAID) -- they just interact with the filesystems presented to them by the OS. (It'd be very cool if hardware acceleration worked like that, but I don't know if it does.)
Click to expand...

Thanks. That is what I was trying to say (apparently, not very successfully). Anyway, I don't mind being told I was wrong. This is why I visit a site like this - try to learn something new.

So it could be possible that one software works better with ATI (becasue it is optimized for ATI), while the other works better with Nvidia ... And it will be very difficult to tell which company has better video acceleration.

Anyway, I am happily confused.
 
I don't know but the image quality was completely unaccetable out of the box with my HD3850. And the options in CCC were crap. So I had to install PowerDVD to disable the hardware acceleration and now the quality is fine. I'm not sure if it's as good as it was on the 7600GT but at least most of the processing should be turned off now. How is this not an option in CCC?
 
Originally posted by: ectx
So it could be possible that one software works better with ATI (becasue it is optimized for ATI), while the other works better with Nvidia ... And it will be very difficult to tell which company has better video acceleration.

Anyway, I am happily confused.
Click to expand...
No, there shouldn't be a difference, at least from the software perspective. Basically the DXVA API abstracts everything; you just pass a stream to DXVA and it does the rest. Differences in quality would be due to the hardware and whatever the associated driver settings are.
 
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