NVidia decodes H.264 in Hardware

Still a few months behind ATI, but it'll be interesting to see if Godfrey Cheng mellows out the trash-talking on the point now (something about "putting it on a PowerPoint presentation doesn't count."). :LOL:

Edit: Ahh. . .missed the 6600GT ref to 1080. Given that X1600 is currently only certified by ATI to 720. . .
 
Is there even going to be widespread 1080 content early in the HD revolution? Seems like most hardware/media is on the 720 bandwagon.
 
Yes, it makes ATI look particularly silly.

Still, we gotta see if it pans out for real.

The OpenMAX IL story doesn't seem to have gotten much attention, either:

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=178

This sounds to me like it's the "wrapper" tech within which NVidia has implemented the H.264 decoding.

Or at least that the two are strongly related.

Jawed
 
trinibwoy said:
Is there even going to be widespread 1080 content early in the HD revolution? Seems like most hardware/media is on the 720 bandwagon.
Click to expand...
I dunno - Blu Ray appears to be being marketed on the basis of 1080p - but what that amounts to is anyone's guess.

Jawed
 
Any ideas if the "broken" 6800xx AGP cards will support this? I really want to upgrade and use my 6800GT for a HTPC, but without WMV9 and H.264 support, I may just have to get a different card.
 
Jawed said:
Yes, it makes ATI look particularly silly.
Click to expand...
How?

I'll believe NV has implemented this tech, when their MPEG2/WMV9 offloading tech starts working the way it's intended.

Besides, from what I've read, it requires MORE purchasing of shit that isn't included with an already very expensive video card, namely a DVD movie player program. No WMP10 support (or any other media player) it seems!
 
Guden Oden said:
How?

I'll believe NV has implemented this tech, when their MPEG2/WMV9 offloading tech starts working the way it's intended.

Besides, from what I've read, it requires MORE purchasing of shit that isn't included with an already very expensive video card, namely a DVD movie player program. No WMP10 support (or any other media player) it seems!
Click to expand...

It's another marketing ploy. Just like nVidia touted SM 3.0, now they can go and pull the same stunt with 1080p support. It's almost the exact same arguement as with SM 3.0 support. It didn't matter that there weren't any games that supported it, as long as nVidia did and ATI didn't. It's stupid but so is the average consumer.
 
NVIDIA's PureVideo is a programmable engine and it was always on the cards that they were going to accelerate H.264 - they mentioned this back at the G70 Editors Days. The question is how many blocks are they offloading, hence does it have a similar CPU reduction.
 
Okay, why can't I prove for myself that h.264 is some great ogre of a cpu-eating codec?

I go to apple's hd site, and play this video in 720p: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/bbc-andes.html

It looks just dandy in the free QT7, and my AMD X2 ticks along in the 22-26% range. This is before I just downloaded the ati trial of the cyberlink codec, which made no difference when I went back and did it again --presumably because QT7 uses its own codec instead.

Unfortunately, the Apple site doesn't allow you with the free QT player to save the file to your hd and then play it in whatever player you'd like. Are there other sites where I can download h.264 content?

And why isn't it bringing my poor cowering CPUs to their knees?
 
geo said:
Okay, why can't I prove for myself that h.264 is some great ogre of a cpu-eating codec?

I go to apple's hd site, and play this video in 720p: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/bbc-andes.html

It looks just dandy in the free QT7, and my AMD X2 ticks along in the 22-26% range. This is before I just downloaded the ati trial of the cyberlink codec, which made no difference when I went back and did it again --presumably because QT7 uses its own codec instead.

Unfortunately, the Apple site doesn't allow you with the free QT player to save the file to your hd and then play it in whatever player you'd like. Are there other sites where I can download h.264 content?

And why isn't it bringing my poor cowering CPUs to their knees?
Click to expand...
Are you being sarcastic?
You have an expensive dual core CPU...
My 2500+ stuggles just playing 720P H264 quicktime movies.
Interestingly it can play 720P wmv-hds without any hardware accel from my 6600GT.

Back to topic, so why can't ati's 1600 and lower series assist decoding 1080P while nvidis's can?
 
geo said:
Okay, why can't I prove for myself that h.264 is some great ogre of a cpu-eating codec?

I go to apple's hd site, and play this video in 720p: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/bbc-andes.html

It looks just dandy in the free QT7, and my AMD X2 ticks along in the 22-26% range. This is before I just downloaded the ati trial of the cyberlink codec, which made no difference when I went back and did it again --presumably because QT7 uses its own codec instead.

Unfortunately, the Apple site doesn't allow you with the free QT player to save the file to your hd and then play it in whatever player you'd like. Are there other sites where I can download h.264 content?

And why isn't it bringing my poor cowering CPUs to their knees?
Click to expand...

Try 1080p content. Like this http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/x3/

BTW there is a funny bug I just found in the free QT7 player that lets you save files to your disk.

If you open the file from the website, then check View->Loop then close the player - it will ask you if you want to save the file because it thinks you made a change to it.

Try it. I'm using v7.0.2 btw
 
radeonic2 said:
Are you being sarcastic?
You have an expensive dual core CPU...
My 2500+ stuggles just playing 720P H264 quicktime movies.
Interestingly it can play 720P wmv-hds without any hardware accel from my 6600GT.
Click to expand...
Same here on a 3200+. My Turion MT-34 (Xpress 200) notebook seems to do fine, though. Strangely enough (or not) other 720P MPEG4 video work just fine through FFDSHOW on the desktop with plenty CPU to spare (vanilla 6800). Its just anything QT-HD that play like crap on the XP. Heavy SSE2 optimizations, perhaps?
 
Zaphod said:
Same here on a 3200+. My Turion MT-34 (Xpress 200) notebook seems to do fine, though. Strangely enough (or not) other 720P MPEG4 video work just fine through FFDSHOW on the desktop with plenty CPU to spare (vanilla 6800). Its just anything QT-HD that play like crap on the XP. Heavy SSE2 optimizations, perhaps?
Click to expand...
I think apple needs to work on their PC decoder imo and/or H264 takes even more to decode than wmv-hd.
 
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radeonic2 said:
Are you being sarcastic?
You have an expensive dual core CPU...
My 2500+ stuggles just playing 720P H264 quicktime movies.
Interestingly it can play 720P wmv-hds without any hardware accel from my 6600GT.

Back to topic, so why can't ati's 1600 and lower series assist decoding 1080P while nvidis's can?
Click to expand...

No, I wasn't. I was under the impression that even the fastest cpus were supposed to struggle with this thing. And by struggle, I mean peg the cpu usage and still drop frames. Even my previous two year old p4 HT was doing it with no dropped frames. Edit: I'm thinking this is incorrect now --that what I was doing on that P4 was 1080p, but not h.264. They were .wmv files.

Hopefully ATI will get X1600 up to snuff with driver tweaks. I believe some informal testing has shown it capable of doing 1080p --but they haven't certified it.
 
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