Questions on video playback.

[CI]

In the earlier days, companies liked to talk about hardware video playback capabilities like iDCT, motion adaptive bob-and-weave de-interlacing, motion compensation, etc. Are VPUs nowadays still relying on hardwired units to do video processing or has the job been fully replaced by running the video stream through programmable shaders?

If so, is there a reference for the minimum requirement (eg. DX8.1 or DX9.0 hardware) for these features?

 

[Humus]

I think most hardware still relies on special hardware for video processing. I guess it may change at some point, but I don't think it's feasible to do for instance iDCT through a fragment shader on the R300. It takes 64 samples, and the hardware only does 31 at most in a single pass. I don't know much about the other video processing features you mention, but my intuition tells me that those are likely even more complex than the iDCT.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Motion Compensation might run one day in the Shaders: on PlayStation 2 it is done by the EE's RISC core in Software.