R520 (Kaleidoscope?) HD Decode/Decompression Capabilities

[Moloch]

Whatever happened to WMV (HD?) acceleration? :? Does the R520 HD acceleration include that

Microsoft have finally delivered a patch for mplayer10 ... enjoy it!

Where is this patch? I see nothing on Microsoft's MediaPlayer or their WUS sites about it...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888656

 

[pakotlar]

Someone said that any cheapo PC has the grunt to decode H.264 files, and I have to disagree. As far as I know, it's about as CPU intensive to decode as WMV9, and I know from experience that (for instance) Athlon 64s are shite at decoding WMV9 HD content. Something like an A64 3000+ is only just capable of decoding, say, a 10Mbit 1080p WMV9 file, whereas a 3.0GHz P4 will chew it up at an average of around 50% CPU time. A 3.8GHz P4 absolutely eats WMV9 stuff for breakfast. AFAIK, it's down to the P4's superior streaming SIMD performance, which is more ckockspeed-bound than other computations. I'm expecting H.264 decode to be the same. It's also worth noting that only the very fastest 2.13GHz Pentium Ms are capable of decoding very high bitrate WMV9 stuff. So, decode support from a video card will be key, both to enable decode on notebooks and low power PCs, and to free up resources. Multi core CPUs make that less of an issue, but for me as a journalist, I'll be including an HD H.264 decoe test in my system/CPU/whatever reviews as soon as Apple release QT7 for windows, or as soon as another large player releases a quality H.264 decoder. Even if there's not much content now, for me it's very nice to know how a system or CPU handles decoding H.264. It's clearly going to the the dominant standard for HD content.

50% on a p4 HT cpu does not indicate that only 50% of the cpu resources are being utilized. What it means is that 100% of CPU 0 (or the actual, physical logic) is beign used, with CPU 1 being unused (the theoretical processor, the HT front-end). The only nice thing about decoding with p4 systems (over a64 systems) is that in single-cpu scenarios, the p4 will allow you to multitask a bit better, even during 100% cpu utilization. BTW, the reason that CPU 1 isn't being used is because decoding under WM10 is a single-threaded scenario AFAIK.

 

[Jawed]

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2433

ATI is addressing one part of the problem by offering GPU-accelerated H.264 decoding with the R520. The demo was conducted on 25Mbps HD footage recorded using a HD video camera and played back on a Pentium 4 3.6GHz system (Hyper Threading enabled) with a R520 graphics card.

CPU utilization without the GPU acceleration enabled was stated to be between 90 - 95%, but when GPU accelerated H.264 decode was enabled the CPU utilization dropped to around 33%. We witnessed the GPU-accelerated playback first hand and were quite impressed.

Jawed