Codecs State of HW acceleration (1 Viewer)

[velis]

Sorry for this stupid question, but does anyone know for sure what the current state of HW video playback acceleration is?

The thing is, I have an 8800GTS + HD4350 at home and I have yet to see any CPU usage drop from playing various media.
Of course, i only care about H264 since all other codecs are easy enough on the CPU for it to be able to handle them no problem. Usually low resolution helps too.

I've tried pretty much every codec out there (CoreAVC, Cyberlink, Avivo, PureVideo), but none of them gave me any good results (read: HW acceleration).
Either they wouldn't play the media at all or they simply didn't use HW for acceleration. Well, even if they did, CPU utilization was just about the same as with ffdshow.

Note that I recode my camera movies with x264 and also pretty much everything video like (that I have) is x264 as well.
I have tried some Apple trailers, MPEG2 and XVID + DivX movies, all without result.

So what gives? Am I stupid or am I just using wrong sample movies / codecs / what?

 

[petsa]

Hi Velis,

I have an 8600GT and it works well with HW acceleration for h264. I have tried both PDVD8 and CoreAVC. At the moment I use CoreAVC for h264 and they now support CUDA to accelerate decoding. I have no idea about ATI cards.

/Peter

 

[venares]

ATI is a bit hit and miss depending on if the file if properly encoded.
Nvidia with CoreAVC and CUDA simply dosent care and has played every thing I have thrown at it, even files that my ATI card just refused to accelerate.

 

[velis]

Looks like I chose a wrong card for my HTPC then

 

[dangerzone]

me to, am thinking of buying a nvidia card en dump my ati

 

[drealit]

DXVA Support in MPC Home Cinema

You just don't have it setup correctly... it's not a matter of nvidia vs. ati. Both work fine (although if your nvidia 8800GTS is the G80 version then I think it is not compatible... the 4350 should definitely be fine though) it's a matter of setting up your software/codecs correctly. Try that DXVA page I listed along with MPC HC as a quick test... it should be really easy to get going with that setup. Then you can go from there to troubleshoot why the software you want isn't working.

And if a file isn't properly encoded and DXVA is broken - lack of a 4.1 profile etc. - then the file isn't worth being on my server lol. We want quality encodes not half assed scene stuff hehe.

 

[Ticiano]

I use a GF8200 onboard here and by now I preffer to use DXVA with MPC instead of CoreAVC with Cuda. Both are doing fine with the HW aceleration, with the CPU usage on my phenom X3 dropping from 50% to less than 10%, buy I think the image quality with MPC is better...

 

[ma9mwah]

The 8800GTS is based off the older G90 core, so sadly that means you only get purevideo1 and not 2 so you wont get any decent HW acceleration all.

 

[Ticiano]

me to, am thinking of buying a nvidia card en dump my ati

When I made my choice for the nVidia GPU instead of an ATI one, I made it based on my reading about HW acceleration for HD material and I thought CoreAVC with Cuda would give me more versatility than DXVA. I was seeing a lot of people talking about H264 files being "non-compliant" with DXVA, so I though Cuda would do the job in any case. Now I have tested both an there's no big diference if MediaPortal is well configured for DXVA with the SAF codecs and MPC subtitles... I tested a lot of movies and I couldn't see anyone showing problems with DXVA aceleration... So, I'm using DXVA by now. With my GF8200 onboad it's doing aways fine, I don't know about what happens with some ATI GPUs and this problems we read about.

I'd like to make some tests with Cuda to make possible using FFDShow postprocessing settings to improve image quallity, but it's not easy... I just couldn't get Cuda and FFDShow postprocessing working simultaneously, even when I know it's, in theory, possible.

 

[velis]

I just made a rant about this here.

To sum it up, I think it's disgraceful of both ATI and Nvidia that they brag about acceleration ant then provide such a limited feature set that it hurts.

Yes, I know acceleration can be achieved. Just not on my clips. And I am not transcoding them just to make a POS piece of HW happy. I bought it to make me happy, not the other way around.