UPDATED! - My Tests are In! The new 81.26 drivers DO use both cores! More than 70% 2x core usage.

[Gamingphreek]

Not to be an a-hole. BUt can someone PLEASE provide something other than synthetic benches here. 3dMark and Aquamark are nice and all but please, lets see a something we can play.

-Kevin

 

[Heinrich]

What if any are downsides to installing these drivers? I saw reference to bugs..

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: BikeDude

Originally posted by: UltraWide
And not many programs are multi-threaded, etc.

Add the "Threads" column to Task Manager and I think you'll find that all Win32 apps are multi-threaded.

I think what you meant to say is that very few apps divide their processing into more than one worker thread, thus they end up with a single thread eating 100% of one core, rather than two threads using both cores.

All this assumes the user is only interested in running a single CPU intensive task.

Agreed.

 

[biostud]

In the German review the performance increase in 3dmark and aquamark was not that great, but some games increased quite alot. The reason could be that the drivers improve test that generally are CPU limited, which 3dmark 05 isn't.

http://www.hardwareoc.at/Geforce-7-Treibervergleich.htm

 

[the Chase]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Not to be an a-hole. BUt can someone PLEASE provide something other than synthetic benches here. 3dMark and Aquamark are nice and all but please, lets see a something we can play.

-Kevin

Kevin- if you would send me a 7800gtx and say a 4400X2 I would try my best to run any/all benchies that you want to see!!

 

[formulav8]

My tests show that the drivers don't just work on 7800 cards.

My card is a 6800 Non-Ultra that I enabled the pipes on. so, 16x6x pipes. I guess you could say its a low clocked 6800 GT/Ultra.

All of my info is based on my video card. The drivers still used about 15%-20% of the 2nd core with the 6800 card. So, I don't see how it helps only the 7800 video card.



Jason

 

[Duvie]

Originally posted by: Heinrich
What if any are downsides to installing these drivers? I saw reference to bugs..

I haven't seen any....Past beta drivers have done some things to my video palyback (gamma settings) but these were fine...

I ran NFS 2 underground at 1600x1200 full settings and everything was fine...did thast for about 30 minutes....tested Flatout...it was fine....I am not a first person shooter fan so I have nothing to test out there...

 

[formulav8]

About the only game thus far that I think the drivers don't like is KOTOR. It gets real laggy and does 100% dual core usage which is not good to do at all. So, something doesn't seem quite right I may look somemore into it but how many people really play KOTOR still?? Not many i'm sure.



Jason

 

[rbV5]

A little off topic, but was h.264 hardware decoding enabled with these drivers? Might be a good test.

 

[formulav8]

Would a 6800 NU AGP have that feature? If it does how would I go about testing it??


Jason

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: formulav8
Would a 6800 NU AGP have that feature? If it does how would I go about testing it??


Jason

If you are talking about H.264 decoding, I doubt 6800nu could support it with its fubured PVP.

As far as testing it, I'm not sure if its as simple as playing back an H.264 encoded file, however I recall the 80 series drivers were "supposed" to enable hardware H.264 decoding on 7800 at least.

All other Purevideo features so far enabled require: driver support + software support, I've not the details for H.264 decoding however.

*Even without purevideo support, these drivers could perhaps help CPU decoding, so its worth a try testing some h.264 encoded files.

 

[the Chase]

Originally posted by: formulav8
My tests who that the drivers don't just work on 7800 cards.

My card is a 6800 Non-Ultra that I enabled the pipes on. so, 16x6x pipes. I guess you could say its a low clocked 6800 GT/Ultra.

All of my info is based on my video card. The drivers still used about 15%-20% of the 2nd core with the 6800 card. So, I don't see how it helps only the 7800 video card.



Jason

Cool- thanks Jason- the dual core X2 is looking more and more to be on my upgrade list.

 

[xtknight]

Wouldn't the H.264 decoder have to support the card's acceleration too? I don't think any accelerated ones exist today.

 

[sbuckler]

Originally posted by: Topweasel
Again I would doubt that you will see an increase in CPU starved Senarios. From what I have read it is more of a offloading of some computations (vertex is one rumor) to the second CPU. While great for improving performance now i am guessing it will be more of a hinderence once games actually use the Second core. To me it is a Hack, a good hack, a hack I would use, but a hack non the less.

If it's a game that is cpu starved and only uses 1 cpu I would have thought you are likely to see a benefit as some calculations previously done by that cpu can be done by the other one. In the future who knows how many cpu's we will have - it's 2 now but pretty soon will be 4, then 8, ... Anyway of making better use of all these cpu's sounds like a good thing to me.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: the Chase

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Not to be an a-hole. BUt can someone PLEASE provide something other than synthetic benches here. 3dMark and Aquamark are nice and all but please, lets see a something we can play.

-Kevin

Kevin- if you would send me a 7800gtx and say a 4400X2 I would try my best to run any/all benchies that you want to see!!

Lol

Ill get right on it

But in all seriousness, in your experience is there, any difference in any games that you have tried thus far.

-Kevin

 

[the Chase]

Well I don't have the right hardware to see- I think these drivers help 7800/dual core setups the most- Velk has some figures for Doom 3 earlier in thread and the Inquirer(I know-the Inquirer) is suppose to have some benchmarks with graphs coming soon for these drivers.

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Wouldn't the H.264 decoder have to support the card's acceleration too? I don't think any accelerated ones exist today.

Who knows? My understanding was that H.264 decoding was going to be enabled in 80 series drivers. They built their own DVD decoder, presumably they could build their own H.264 decoder.

In any event, it would be interesting if software decoding could take advantage of dual cores. Maybe someone could test H.264 decoding and give some feedback.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Has there been tests run on the PVP of the 7 series. I haven't seen any.

rbV5, from what i heard that was supposed to be in the final release of the 80 series driver, might not have made it in the leaked beta drivers. THough im not 100% positive. THe rel. 80 drivers also support different BIOS. card manf and what not in SLI. You still need to have the same essential chip (6800GT/6800GT) but you dont need the same BIOS or anything.

People keep speaking of H.264 encoding. Is there really anything jaw dropping that it supports (ie: How big of a deal is it).

-Kevin

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Has there been tests run on the PVP of the 7 series. I haven't seen any.

rbV5, from what i heard that was supposed to be in the final release of the 80 series driver, might not have made it in the leaked beta drivers. THough im not 100% positive. THe rel. 80 drivers also support different BIOS. card manf and what not in SLI. You still need to have the same essential chip (6800GT/6800GT) but you dont need the same BIOS or anything.

People keep speaking of H.264 encoding. Is there really anything jaw dropping that it supports (ie: How big of a deal is it).

-Kevin

That's what I hear too. I looked it up and I saw it briefly mentioned on a French site but no real word of it. Anyways I doubt it would work at this stage anyway.

H.264 provides twice the quality of MPEG-2 at the same bitrate, so it is a big deal for encoders.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Oh wow.

Is h.264 set to become the new video standard then.

How does it accomplish that. Is it simply more compressed or is it a different type of compression. (Not to hijack this thread or anything).

-Kevin

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Oh wow.

Is h.264 set to become the new video standard then.

How does it accomplish that. Is it simply more compressed or is it a different type of compression. (Not to hijack this thread or anything).

-Kevin

I think H.264 is going to be used for HD-DVD or Blu Ray and in the future possibly HDTV for twice the quality or subchannels in the same 6 MHz bandwidth.

H.264 is a more complex compression. More stages to go through to get the compressed data, and likewise more stages to go through to get it decompressed than any other popular codec (I think). For example H.264 has inloop deblocking but MPEG-2 doesn't. That alone will add to the decoding time. I'm sure it has more encoding stages too.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2536&p=4
This is why it's so important to have it accelerated. It looks like H.264 encodes at 0.5 FPS whereas MPEG-2 encodes at 5 FPS or so, but I'm only extrapolating from the graph there.

 

[rbV5]

People keep speaking of H.264 encoding. Is there really anything jaw dropping that it supports (ie: How big of a deal is it).

Its a big enough deal that I'd like to transcode my entire video library, and would love to see hardware encoders replace the hardware Mpeg encoders on my MCE rigs.

Its scalable from low resolution streams up to the highest resolution HD, but decoding/encoding tax even powerful rigs currently.

So if these dual core drivers can provide even a little boost to H.264 decoding, it could help.

 

[Gamingphreek]

So is it possible to record (from an HTPC) and encode directly into h.264, instead of MPEG-2.

-Kevin

 

[rbV5]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
So is it possible to record (from an HTPC) and encode directly into h.264, instead of MPEG-2.

-Kevin

Sure it is provided you have the codecs installed and a capture utility that supports it. Problem is that you will need to encode in software on the fly, which means 1-pass and fairly low resolution due to the CPU utilization required to encode H.264.

In any case, as far as topical discussion, I'm interested in:

*Was H.264 hardware decoding enabled in 80 series drivers?
*Do the Dual core drivers help when decoding H.264 (or any video for that matter, but I'm particularly interested in H.264)

 

[formulav8]

So was the 6800 NU supposed to have that feature but it was implemented wrong or something like that?? Would be kinda interesting I guess.


Jason