RV3x0 and WMA accel?

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swaaye

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I was trying to play some 720p WMV on my old eMachines Athlon 64 3000+ laptop with a 9600 and was stunned to see it couldn't do it smoothly. (Fallout 3 trailer) The WMA accel checkbox is checked in CCC.

I did some googling and found a review of some of the low-end Intel IGPs along with NV and ATI low-end GPUs. According to this, RV3x0 lacks WMV acceleration! I had no idea... The checkbox is a fake! :)
http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/579/
http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/596/

I had 720p WMVs playing on a Celeron 1300, btw. R300 definitely can handle WMA accel.
 
R300

I'm a little foggy on the details since it's hard to find much info on R300's video playback (it wasn't considered very important at the time), but I would be extremely surprised if there were any sort of WMV acceleration built into R300 based chips.

Just out of curiosity, I watched several different WMV videos on my slightly newer R430, ranging from very low res all the way up to 1080p. I monitored the CPU usage with "WMV Acceleration" both on and off, and found no noteworthy difference in ANY of the clips.

If this feature does anything, you likely need an R520 (X1800) or newer to see it.

As for WMV HD acceleration (also known as VC-1) even the top 8800 and HD2900 cards don't have this at the moment. The lower-end 8600/8500 and HD2600/2400 do (because they are slightly "newer") but these are the ONLY cards which currently have VC-1 acceleration.

With your cards, VC-1 playback is going to be completely dependent on the CPU. It's possible that your laptop had the CPU throttled down.
 
R3xx/R4xx serie supports WMV acceleration via VideoShader (pixel shader). WMV aceleration checkbox doesn't work, but the acceleration does. Radeon 9600 PRO + Athlon64 3200+ and "media player classic" results in 50% CPU usage when playing 720p and about 80% CPU usage when playing 1080p. Older Radeons (R9000, R7200 etc.) can't play these videos fluently, so the feature seems to work correctly :)
 
no-X said:
R3xx/R4xx serie supports WMV acceleration via VideoShader (pixel shader). WMV aceleration checkbox doesn't work, but the acceleration does. Radeon 9600 PRO + Athlon64 3200+ and "media player classic" results in 50% CPU usage when playing 720p and about 80% CPU usage when playing 1080p. Older Radeons (R9000, R7200 etc.) can't play these videos fluently, so the feature seems to work correctly :)
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I stand corrected. However, using an X2 3800 I wasn't able to get more than ~18% usage @ 720p, or ~27% usage @1080p using any application (WMP, VLC, MPC). Apparently the feature isn't able to be toggled?

I agree that those numbers seem too low for the GPU not to be accelerating, but now I'm slightly confused when they say all these cards "don't have VC-1 acceleration". Maybe they mean they don't have 100% offloading?
 
Try out the 720p Fallout 3 trailer on Voodooextreme from a couple of days ago. It won't play fluidly on my laptop (Athlon 64 3000+ with 9600 NP). It's close. The CPU is around 90% usage. The thing is that some 720p stuff is fine on the machine, but not this vid.

I tried both WMP11 (DXVA enabled in options) and latest stable Media Player Classic from freecodecs. Running Cat 7.4. I even tried overclocking the 9600 (300 -> 420 MHz).

Like I said too, I had a Radeon 9700 in a Celeron 1300 and was able to play 720p files. That is not something a Celeron 1300 can do on its own. So R300 definitely has some assist.
 
It plays smooth when I disable DXVA in WMP11. Seems to be a bug with DXVA. No other settings in the advanced area of the performance tab affected it. With DXVA off, not only is it smooth, but it's also only using 45-60% CPU for the Fallout3 trailer.
 
AFAIK, R3x0 used shaders for WMV assist, not special hardware. So you'd think RV3x0 would be able to assist, too, if not as well b/c they're inherently less powerful (though halving an A64 3000+'s load is impressive for a 9600NP, moreso if the mobile version's clocked lower). So I was slightly puzzled that you and HW.fr saw no accel.

Good catch, swaaye. Back when enabling WMV assist was a series of separate downloads and steps, I remember that I had to toggle "high quality mode" for WMP(9 or 10)'s video mixing renderer to enable my 9800P (which, IIRC, made 720p smooth with an XP2400+). Is that the same as DXVA in WMP11?
 
This is the window from WMP11 with the settings that are working fine for me. Turning on that DXVA box is what really kills video playback performance for whatever reason.

wmp11-9600.jpg
 
swaaye said:
It plays smooth when I disable DXVA in WMP11. Seems to be a bug with DXVA. No other settings in the advanced area of the performance tab affected it. With DXVA off, not only is it smooth, but it's also only using 45-60% CPU for the Fallout3 trailer.
Click to expand...

Is AGP Fast Writes enabled?
 
yup. AGP is at 8X with both fast writes and sideband addressing enabled. As reported by Everest. The mobo chipset is VIA K8T800M. I can't go into CCC while in remote desktop to see the other settings though (I'm at work ).

I'm using the mobility catalyst 7.5 drivers now too. The laptop is Arima-built and ATI supports it with their mobility drivers.
 
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