Catalyst 10.6 - Video Quality Improvements

Except in this case VLC is the IE6.

 

Because it doesnt have workarounds for bugs and non-standard behavior like MPC does? Quite a strange logic.
Heres some code from MPC`s svn repository (shared with ffmpeg):

Code:

	switch (nPCIVendor)
	{
	case PCIV_ATI :
		// The ATI way
		memcpy (pDest, pSource, sizeof (DXVA_Qmatrix_H264));
		break;

	default :
		// The nVidia way (and other manufacturers compliant with specifications....)
		for (i=0; i<6; i++)
			for (j=0; j<16; j++)
				pDest->bScalingLists4x4[i][j] = pSource->bScalingLists4x4[i][ZZ_SCAN[j]];

		for (i=0; i<2; i++)
			for (j=0; j<64; j++)
				pDest->bScalingLists8x8[i][j] = pSource->bScalingLists8x8[i][ZZ_SCAN8[j]];
		break;
	}

 

Drazick: Anandtech is known for several video-related articles, which were released in the meantime, when nVidia supported some feature already, while ATi didn't (yet).

E.g. the HQV benchmarking in X1800 era. Until ATi released a driver, which raised the score, almost every review on Anandtech contained HQV benchmark results.

Another example was the review of HD5450. It criticised deinterlacing quality. Day or two later the reviewer wrote a blog post stating, that the low deinterlacing quality appeared only after enabling ESVP feature in pre-launch drivers, while official driver release fixed it. The page in original review was never corrected or updated; it still informs about low deinterlacing quality, which in fact cannot be experienced by end users, because it occured only when using specific driver release, which wasn't available to end users.

Now, when ATi has an advantage in HQV 2.0 benchmark, Anandtech doesn't care. But they care for HW acceleration in VLC player, which isn't currently supported by ATi. No matter how many alternative players are supported for years...

 

I hope there will be change, and this is only the beginning.
I've always sympathized the underdog, my personal favorite is ATI.

Yet, for me, not a gamer at all, it's hard to see the lack of 2D performances (Matlab rendering is awfully slow, I mean rendering al the graphs etc...), the slow GPGPU progress (Compared to CUDA and Open CL existing only in Dev packages) etc...

I hope you'll change it soon. Cause your simple and clean attitude is what I like.

Thanks for reading and caring.

 

I see.
Anyhow, What I mean, there always be problems with new features.
As a customer I'm aware of that and accept it as long as I know the company fixes it.

To me it seems that ATI is too much gamer oriented.
nVidia is taking all the GPGPU for itself.

Graphic card should do more than 3D. I want Video Encoding / Decoding acceleration, GPGPU in all possible ways (For me, give me some acceleration in Matlab, Mathematica, Phtotoshop, Premier, the all seem to chose CUDA).

They need to be more aggressive, show some initiatives not related to 3D etc.

Anyhow, They did what's expected - It will be fixed soon.
I'll be there to try it .

 

Speaking of ATI and video is there any reason why ATI video cards don't fully accelerate MPEG-2? Nvidia cards do and I'm guessing Intel probably do also, but ATI only have iDCT

Is the UVD processor not capable, or is it a driver issue?

More info here

 

From Drazick's link... http://www.anandtech.com/show/3786/hd-video-decoding-on-gpus-with-vlc-110/2

And from Catalystmaker@twitter

Wonder if the changes in VLC are more than removing the if (!nvidia) check, or they also had to follow DXVA spec and not just the nvidia implementation

 

In fact, it was ATi who brought many new video features on market. My memory isn't very good, but I can recall, that ATi was first with hardware motion compensaiton (somewhen in 1996/97 on Rage II+DVD or Rage PRO), 4-tap horizontal/ 4-tap vertical video upscaling (Rage 128), first with hardware-supported adaptive deinterlacing (Rage 128), fist with HW iDCT (Rage 128), first with per-pixel adaptive deinterlacing (Radeon), X1000 brougth new deinterlacing techniques, which removed stair-stepping artifacts on moving objects plus new 6-tap/10-tap upscaling kernel. If I'm not mistaken, ATi use 10/15 now...

It's interesting, how many people care about check-box features. ATi is offering better upscaling techniques (= feature, which affects any video - low quality, SD, HD, independently on format or codec) for more than a decade, but there's not any single mention about it in reviews...

 

What are the optimal settings for the new features in 10.6 anyway? The defaults set stuff like flesh tone correction and mosquito noise reduction to 0, which I'm guessing can't be optimal? The hothardware review states that the next catalyst will have the optimal settings as the defaults, but could we have the optimal settings posted so we can set them now?

 

Yeah, ATI is the way to go for HTPC's IMHO. I bought an HD 5450 specifically for HD Audio bitstreaming capabilities. Unfortunately I'm having issues with driver crashes using DXVA (haven't tried 10.6 yet) but that's not all that important. I'm hoping it gets fixed nonetheless.

 

For me, that's optimal. Since every movie is different, different settings are optimal depending on which movie you're watching.

And better to not interfere until the user chooses to do so himself. IMHO.

 

http://www.videolan.org/

 

Great news.
I hope it works with HD3XXX series.

 

I'd hope so, IIRC MPC Home Cinema offered h264 hardware acceleration for ATI as far back as the Radeon X1600 Pro.

I can remember buying one even though my X800 Pro was better for older games.

It's still in a system that's been gathering dust for two years.

I can't remember though how it fared with x264 files that had the 5.1 profile and used more reference frames. I think initially at least that was a problem.

Anyway, http://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/1.1.1.html

"DxVA2 decoding on ATI GPU, with Catalyst 10.7"

Word on the street is Monday for the new cat's?

 

It does not work on my AGP X1950Pro (WinXP32, Cat. 10.2)...

 

They'll run out of July if not this week

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1897/2

I guess I was limited to 720p with my X1600 Pro.

That sounds right, now that I think about it.

Anyway, the videolan people are using a different method for DxVA than the MPC peeps. I'd forgotten about that.


http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_GPU_Decoding

"We believe you need a GPU supporting UVD+, but you might require a UVD2 compatible GPU. We don't have the hardware to test so far. We have tested against Radeon 4K so far."

 

I believe that the only player that supports H.264 X1000 decoding acceleration is Cyberlink one...