- September 2, 2007
- 85
- 58
- Home Country
-
Belgium
One of the many things I considered while defining the configuration of my HTPC last year (Zalman case), was the GPU acceleration.
That's why I chose the nVidea 8500GT Silent card (no fan = 0% noise) as video hardware and PowerDVD 8 (originally 7.2) as rendering codecs.
PowerDVD has the nVideaPure decoders build in (that's why the cost is high) and uses the GPU of the nVidea card directly.
When I play the latest films on 1080p my energy efficient Athlon 64 X2 CPU is not put under more pressure than with a normal HDTV/720p or DVD movie. So the fan's don't have to run faster and the case remains silent.
That PowerDVD codec can play 1080p without stuttering, CoreAVC also can, but not without raising the CPU %.
I don't have any idea which soft can enable the H.264 ATI hardware, but that's what you have to start looking for.
Note that a version 4.1 enabler will suffice (for 1920x1080@30.1), although we now have v5.1 (for 4096x2048@30.0) for which the flatscreens still have to be mass produced
That's why I chose the nVidea 8500GT Silent card (no fan = 0% noise) as video hardware and PowerDVD 8 (originally 7.2) as rendering codecs.
PowerDVD has the nVideaPure decoders build in (that's why the cost is high) and uses the GPU of the nVidea card directly.
When I play the latest films on 1080p my energy efficient Athlon 64 X2 CPU is not put under more pressure than with a normal HDTV/720p or DVD movie. So the fan's don't have to run faster and the case remains silent.
That PowerDVD codec can play 1080p without stuttering, CoreAVC also can, but not without raising the CPU %.
I don't have any idea which soft can enable the H.264 ATI hardware, but that's what you have to start looking for.
Note that a version 4.1 enabler will suffice (for 1920x1080@30.1), although we now have v5.1 (for 4096x2048@30.0) for which the flatscreens still have to be mass produced