X800 series video acceleration

[Goi]

Hi,
A friend of mine recently got an X850XT AGP and since he's a film nut I asked him to go view some HD WMV/MPEG-2 clips. He had a GF3-Ti200 before this so Iwas expecting that the new video card would play videos a lot smoother since it provides such acceleration. However, he doesn't seem to think so. I'm wondering if he needs some sort of software or anything to take advantage of the hardware acceleration? I know with my 6800GT I need Purevideo but I wasn't aware of any such decoder for ATI. He's currently using the Catalyst 5.11 or 5.12, and WMP to play the HD clips.

Thanks!

 

[kurt454]

Microsoft has released two patches for DXVA acceleration of WMVHD clips using WMP10. They cut my cpu usage almost in half.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=888656&SD=tech

 

[Goi]

What about regular MPEG-2?

 

[kurt454]

You can use purevideo with ATI cards. The deinterlacing won't be as nice as on Nvidia cards. I think ATI has an mpeg2 decoder based off of PowerDVD for their cards.

 

[imported_goku]

Tell him to use VLC media player, after using that, I've noticed that when I play HD, it runs very smoothly compared to other players and looks wonderful, I'm assuming that it's taking advantage of my hardware compared to other players.

 

[Goi]

I don't think Purevideo makes use of ATI's hardware acceleration right? And VLC has it's own decoder much like MPC, except with MPC you can override the decoders, no way of doing that with VLC. I was hoping on a more general solution. He has Zoom Player installed too.

 

[kurt454]

I believe Purevideo does activate hardware acceleration on the Radeon cards,BUT deinterlacing of video based DVDs will be a little better using PV on an Nvidia card. Film based DVDs should look and run great for either card.

 

[Munky]

Surprised nobody mentioned this yet, but are the fastwrites enabled in the bios? With FW enabled, I could play WMV HD clips on a AXP/9800p rig, even before the MS patch came out, although it did take up like 95% cpu utilization. Install the patch and tha latest drivers, and it should work even better.

 

[kurt454]

Anandtech article on enabling a registry key for hardware acceleration of WMV clips using WMP10 and Radeon cards.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2305&p=10

 

[Goi]

FW are enabled in the catalyst control center, and I don't think my friend wants to pay for Purevideo. So basically you guys are saying that he can just use any media player and play any MPEG-2/HD-WMV file and there's gonna be HW acceleration?

 

[kurt454]

WMV-HD is not mpeg2, so playback does not require an mpeg2 decoder like Purevideo. Tell your friend to try either the registry hack or the two MS patches for WMP10. They will activate DXVA hardware acceleration on WMV clips. Mpeg2 (DVDs) require a decoder to play, such as Purevideo, Dscaler, PowerDVD, etc.

 

[Goi]

Cool, so basically any MPEG-2 decoder out there(dscaler/ffdshow/etc) will use HW acceleration?

 

[kurt454]

Dscaler and ffdshow are software only.

 

[Goi]

So which decoders would allow HW acceleration?

 

[kurt454]

Originally posted by: Goi
So which decoders would allow HW acceleration?

Purevideo, PowerDVD, WinDVD.

Hardware acceleration is almost unnecessary for DVD playback unless you have a Pentium
2 or less. Any modern cpu can decode DVDs in software mode w/o breaking a sweat. The big thing is getting good picture quality with proper cadence detection and deinterlacing.

High Definition is another ballgame. WMVHD does not require a DVD decoder at all. Hardware accel. through WMP is a hit and miss affair for me. Certain drivers will break DXVA with WMP. Hardware acceleration for H.264 video clips does not exist for Nvidia cards, yet. Supposed to be some H.264 decode assist on ATI cards X1000 series.

 

[Goi]

I ask because some of the HD media(720p, 1080p) that my friend views are either MPEG-2 or MPEG-2 transport, both of which require HW acceleration since he only has a A64 3000+.

 

[kurt454]

Originally posted by: Goi
I ask because some of the HD media(720p, 1080p) that my friend views are either MPEG-2 or MPEG-2 transport, both of which require HW acceleration since he only has a A64 3000+.

Ah, OK.
Any of the commercial decoders will use HW. There are quite a few people at avsforum that use ATI cards with purevideo. Your friend could download the trial, and give it a shot.

I don't know of any open source decoders that activate HW acceleration?

 

[Goi]

So I presume stuff like windvd, powerdvd, purevideo and sonic would work?

 

[Malladine]

Momentary hijack question: what is the advantage of hardware acceleration? Higher res movies run smoother?

 

[kurt454]

Originally posted by: Goi
So I presume stuff like windvd, powerdvd, purevideo and sonic would work?

To the best of my knowledge, any of those decoders can access DXVA on most modern video cards. That should drop the cpu load on mpeg-2 decode.

DXVA=DirectX Video Acceleration.

 

[kurt454]

Originally posted by: Malladine
Momentary hijack question: what is the advantage of hardware acceleration? Higher res movies run smoother?

Hardware Acceleration should offload some decoding functions to the graphics cards GPU. Less CPU load = smoother Hi Def playback on lower end machines.