NVIDIA ruins VC1 acceleration to promote new cards/vista?

[SBeaver]

I have an old 6600GT pci-e card and run xp x64.
My oc'ed 3000+ athlon 64 is obviously a little close to the limit for playing HD-DVD and bluray films but it is what I have.
This videocard has some basic VC1 hardware decoding capabillity with purevideo and the MS VC1 decoder while using the overlay renderer in MPC (maybe this actually falls back to some other renderer) or WMR 7 or 9 windowed (which are not as fast on my machine).

I've tried almost all beta builds of drivers there are for this setup and I have come to the conclusion that everything after version 96.89 completly destroys any hardware acceleration for VC1.
Drivers in the 97.xx series start to drop frames, the older ones never drop frames even if it can't keep up with the audio. (that is the last official one too)
Everything after that in the 100/150/160 series crashes the system when using overlay, and and when using other renderers as well (wmr9/7, some combinations I don't recall exactly) when using the VC1 decoder with DXVA.

This is an old card, no HDCP support obviously and the last working driver 96.89 was leaked in october from ASUS (I don't have an asus card).
Strangly enough not much later Vista is released, no new official drivers since january which don't work anyway, and Nvidia is now promoting their 8xxx cards which will hardware decode _everything_, or so they claim.

It would be nice to hear if anyone else has any similar experiences with Nvidia videocards.

Btw, with this driver, flawless playback of every hd-dvd that I have tried so far. (if copied/decoded to hd and played with MPC)
I don't think I have to add this but in case anyone wonders, powerdvds' hardware decoding also crashes the system when using new drivers.

[KoD]

I wouldn't say it is intended.

It fits nvidia's history of breaking video playback stuff form one driver version to the next, though.

[Ronin-7]

I agree I don't think it is intentional, NVIDIA have been prioritizing what to do lately and have been focusing mostly on games under Vista at the expensive of most others areas until they get it to a fairly well polished level. Most other areas even Purevideo have taken a back seat for the time being & other areas are buggy in Vista like the multi-display setup.

That said the last official driver for the 6600GT under XP 64 is 93.71 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_93.71.html), can I ask why do you need the newer drivers ?

The GF6 series has had it's run of optimizations and the only need for a newer driver is if it's a bug fix for a game or some other issue.

You could try posting on NVIDIA's own forums (http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showforum=33) to alert them of the bug but seeing as the official drivers are fine (I assume) they are not going to do anything about it until the next official release.

{Might be worth investing in a ATI 2400 or 2600 instead when they come out as I hear there will be an AGP version as it has the UVD which will do HD-DVD/Blu-ray VC-1 & H.264 GPU assisted decoding}

[SBeaver]

I agree I don't think it is intentional, NVIDIA have been prioritizing what to do lately and have been focusing mostly on games under Vista at the expensive of most others areas until they get it to a fairly well polished level. Most other areas even Purevideo have taken a back seat for the time being & other areas are buggy in Vista like the multi-display setup.

That said the last official driver for the 6600GT under XP 64 is 93.71 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_93.71.html), can I ask why do you need the newer drivers ?

The GF6 series has had it's run of optimizations and the only need for a newer driver is if it's a bug fix for a game or some other issue.

You could try posting on NVIDIA's own forums (http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showforum=33) to alert them of the bug but seeing as the official drivers are fine (I assume) they are not going to do anything about it until the next official release.

{Might be worth investing in a ATI 2400 or 2600 instead when they come out as I hear there will be an AGP version as it has the UVD which will do HD-DVD/Blu-ray VC-1 & H.264 GPU assisted decoding}


They had a newer driver but it was pulled, but i think it was still on their website.
Anyway, the reason for wanting a newer driver is mainly for some small game issues, but I don't play that often anymore.
Still they have to be aware that their drivers have been broken for 8 months and they havn't done anything to fix it.
Ah well...


edit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_158.22_2.html

hope you can see that page. you see there it says "PureVideo™ HD support is currently only available on Microsoft® Windows™ Vista". I hadn't seen this page before, but now it is pretty obvious it's all about pushing Vista. I mean why make new drivers for xp with all the best features removed? it has to be a AACS/DRM/HDCP/PMP conspiracy to wreak hd playback for everyone not using Vista. Now if they only made a broken driver the latest official release, then I'll know that I was right.

[Ronin-7]

That driver is intended for GeForce 8 cards not GeForce 6.

Vista supports DXVA 2.0 which means for NVIDIA it is a lot easier to get HD-DVD/Blu-ray GPU accelerated under Vista than it is on XP.

NVIDIA have not yet got the GeForce 8 Purevideo VP2 working on XP as they have to use their own custom API as DXVA 1.x does not support H.264, they have said in an interview that they will get it working on XP sometime in July/summer I think it was. So that comment in the release notes almost certainly applies to that & not VC-1 unless that needs something special as well either way it's in the same boat.

No conspiracy just NVIDIA prioritising it's tasks (plus NVIDIA is & always has been slow to fix bugs) and they will only support official drivers once things have stabilized with Vista (for which they took a lot of PR flak on) they will get back to updates on XP which make up the vast bulk of their customers, they are not stupid.

[arfster]

NVidia don't need to do this deliberately. Accidentally breaking video playback on older cards is just their trademark.

[arfster]

NVIDIA have not yet got the GeForce 8 Purevideo VP2 working on XP as they have to use their own custom API as DXVA 1.x does not support H.264, they have said in an interview that they will get it working on XP sometime in July/summer I think it was.

Apparently it works with the 165.xx beta drivers in XP.

[CruNcher]

arfster is right in my analyze work of the Nvidia drivers Video Quality under XP for the Geforce 7 Series i saw that they changed to a complete new architecture in the new Geforce 8 Series Driver starting with the 97.x releases all the PureVideo stuff is completly dead on older cards the nvhwvid.dll is non existant anymore (NVIDIA Motion Estimation Driver) and in the new driver their is an nvucode.bin wich seems to be the VP2 H.264 Decoder (XP Driver). So the Beta XP Drivers Series 10x.xx that have this nvucode.bin should be working with the Geforce 8 Series and H.264 Decoding with the GPU on Windows XP can't test myself but im pretty sure it works and most probably also the Motion Adaptive Per Pixel Deinterlacer works and manages all the HQV Interlacing tests successfull in both SD/HD.

[Ronin-7]

Well talk about timing a new release for XP 32-bit GeForce 6/7 users is out 94.24 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_94.24.html) is out Purevideo HD is supported & specifically mentioned.

There is no equivalent XP 64-bit driver & the last release to have Purevideo support on XP 64-bit was 97.94 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_97.94.html) so clearly as XP 64 is a very niche OS it is down the list of priorities for NVIDIA. Use a modded INF (http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/drivers/xp64) to add support for the 6600GT if you want to try it as the driver looks like it was meant for GF8 cards.

[SBeaver]

Well talk about timing a new release for XP 32-bit GeForce 6/7 users is out 94.24 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_94.24.html) is out Purevideo HD is supported & specifically mentioned.

There is no equivalent XP 64-bit driver & the last release to have Purevideo support on XP 64-bit was 97.94 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_97.94.html) so clearly as XP 64 is a very niche OS it is down the list of priorities for NVIDIA. Use a modded INF (http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/drivers/xp64) to add support for the 6600GT if you want to try it as the driver looks like it was meant for GF8 cards.

this 97.94 was one of the drivers I tried, the dxva is on but it's broken for me and drops frames. it drops about half the frames for me and plays the other half, while 96.xx plays all frames without hickups (hd vc1 video)

[mlansell]

Well talk about timing a new release for XP 32-bit GeForce 6/7 users is out 94.24 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_94.24.html) is out Purevideo HD is supported & specifically mentioned.


Well I just installed the 94.24 driver and now none of my evo files will play except in GraphEdit, where they are all jerky as if HW acceleration is turned on even though I have it turned off (my 7300GS doesn't have the horsepower, but my CPU does).

Looks like I'll have to try to roll back to the previous driver

:-(

Mal

[mahsah]

Bah! This is the one thing that irks me about nvidia. I have a 7600 and an Athlon XP, but I only get mpeg-2 decoding on it! Apparently, you need a SSE2 processor to get AVC and VC1 decoding... which is dumb because the whole point is offloading the processing FROM the cpu.:mad: