The "2900 XT Lacks UVD" Thread

I think, Neliz, that you are demonstrating the accuracy of your avatar caption.

 

I was linked here from the 610/630 thread so was miffed about the "locked" status.. sleep deprived man, sleep deprived...

 

Ok, now Catalyst 7.5 drivers are out and I continued testing with Radeon HD 2900 XT, Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive and couple of HD-DVD movies:





Serenity uses VC-1 codec and Wolf Creek MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) codec

I'm using latest version of Cyberlink's PowerDVD Ultra with patch which adds support to Radeon HD 2000 series graphics cards (Link: http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/download/dl_patch_397_112_ENU.html)

Other system specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
Radeon HD 2900 XT
Foxconn P965 board
2 GB of DDR2
Windows Vista 32-bit

When I enable "Enable hardware acceleration (ATI Avivo)" option from Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra and try to play Wolf Creek (MPEG-4 AVC H.264) this is what I get:



Whole movie looks like seriously corrupted. When I disable hardware acceleration everything is OK. Same happened with 8.38 drivers (press drivers). With early 8.37 drivers there was no corruption but CPU load was the same ATI Avivo enabled or disabled.

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I also downloaded WinDVD 8 Platinum (trial) but it doesn't play HD-DVD movies. Their homepage says that "Upgrade to HD DVD/Blu-ray Disc support with a separate plug-in." but I'm unable to find this plug-in. Any help?

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Dave, Please advise which is the correct method to play hardware accelerated HD-DVD movies with Radeon HD 2900 XT with external HD-DVD drive? Thanks.

Any other help is also appreciated

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PS. With NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 and 8600 series Purevideo HD works fine and CPU load drops dramatically when hardware acceleration is enabled.

 

Seems liek a big part of the delay in this driver was this functionality...with absolutely no acceleration of HD media, even "No UVD" is a misnomer...there is jsut no acceleration period.

AMD called me on the issue...awaiting an update as well.

 

I also asked about this from AMD since last time they replied: "HD decode acceleration will be enabled in the upcoming Catalyst release (7.5), which should become available in the next few days"

I also asked them to describe what is the correct method to test this out since my configuration seems to work just with NVIDIA graphics cards (Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive and Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra).

 

Well actually hardware accelerated MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) decoding seems to work with Radeon X1950 Pro and average CPU load drops from 73 % -> 61 %

 

I think you need a retail copy of 8.0.8+ to playback HD-DVD. I don't think the trial version supports it, sadly. I bought a copy from the WinDVD site just before G84 launched and it works fine.

 

Ok thanks for the info. Have you tried hardware accelerated decoding with HD-DVD playback and Radeon HD 2900 XT?

 

No 1080p here, and I could care less...any other res is not "HD" IMHO. This is BlurayDisc, tho, not HD-DVD. I'll pick up a drive this weekend and check it out.

Any thoughts about removing drive to install internal, Sampsa?

 

The AVC in HD DVD is actually AVC HP (high/advanced profile) so that might be the issue. Take a standard AVC encoded file and play it back with with hardware acceleration enabled to see if it exhibits the same traits.

 

I am curious, goes Rys plan on changing the following line, or issuing a correction?

 

Removed that mention, and the correction is in place on the video page.

 

Thanks... I was not trying to be as ass, really

 

Ok, HD 2900XT lacks UVD, but is it really a big disadvantage?

What's about Vista's DXVA 2.0 and EVR? Is dedicated HW like VP2 or UVD required for DXVA 2.0/EVR or just Vista and a WDDM driver?

 

People always get snarky when they've paid a premium for a top of the line product, only to find it doesn't do everything that the cheaper products can do. Even worse if those cheaper products are made by the same company.

 

Even worser ( ) when claims are made that the top of the line product can and does indeed do everything that the cheaper products can do.

 

I think it's reasonable to assume that the R600 was designed and taped-out months earlier than RV610/630, that the UVD design simply wasn't ready to be included in the former, and that the goal was still to release it in January, months because RV610/630.

Do you think ATI should have delayed the whole schedule of R600 by, say, 4 months, just to make sure it had exactly the same video decoding features?

Marketing exists to make these kinds of trade-offs, and I think they were right in doing so because only a fraction of high-end GPU buyers really care.

(Whether or not they should have been clearer about the presence of this feature in R600 is a whole other matter, of course.)

 

If it's become an issue with buyers that negatively affects sales, and given they were months late anyway, then maybe they should have. It's just another negative piled on top of the other negatives that R600 has. R600 is supposed to be the best that ATI can offer, and it's actually inferior in the much trumpeted hardware decoding to it's little sibling products. That's just not good.

But then I thought they should have scrapped R600 and gone straight to R650 (or whatever the 65 nm version will be called).

I think a lot of high end buyers care because they are looking to buy the best, and instead they are getting a product that is asking them to compromise all over the place. At the same time AMD is telling us how great the video decode is and how everyone needs to have it - unless you've spent the most money and bought their flagship product, in which case you are SOL.

 

The whole point, of course, is that they didn't know it would be 5 months late when this decision was made. Which was probably sometime beginning 2006 at the latests....

 

I see Derek over at Anandtech is getting it off his chest as well in regards to this matter. 2007 seems to be an annus horriblis for AMD graphics department up to now.

Things can be turned around though and hopefully will.