HD-DVD or BRD playback possible on Celeron-D w/ Radeon 2600 AGP card?

[DJ Bobo]

Hi everyone,
Anyone got that new Radeon HD2600 AGP card and tested it w/ HD-DVD or BRD playback?
Because I have an old system with a Celeron D320 processor (2.4GHz) and plenty of RAM (1,25GB DDR333) and I plan to make it HD capable.
I don't wanna invest in a whole new system (if possible!), since HD videos are my only concern, I'm not interested in games.
To give you an idea about the power of this PC, it is barely capable of playing 720p trailers (about 6 mbps average bitrate) w/ CoreAVC. I'm afraid, 1080p won't play right.

[Blue_MiSfit]

It should work fine.

I had HD-DVD working perfectly (1080p) using PowerDVD and a Radeon 2400 Pro on a Sempron 3000+. It was silky smooth after I enabled DXVA, and CPU utilization was around 20%. (careful, because some driver versions have non working DXVA, or black bordered, downscaled output).

The only thing that concerns me is the AGP interface on your card. IIRC, PCI Express is a big part of why hardware acceleration works on the Radeon HD series. You may not have good results with AGP.

Not sure, but best of luck!

Worse case scenario, you have to get a different board and video card :(

~MiSfit

[DJ Bobo]

Thanks for your input Blue, 20% sounds very promising. I guess on a 2,4GHz Celeron-D, it won't be that far from 20% then.

I hope the AGP bus won't make problems. I don't understand why it should anyway, with ~2GB/s bandwidth available, 1920x1080@24fps YV12 input is nothing (How much? 71,2MB/s?)

[Blue_MiSfit]

not much, you're right.

The only thing is that AGP isn't bi-directional screaming fast. I think system -> video is very fast, but video -> system is not fast.

It all depends, but it should be fine!

~MiSfit

[buzzqw]

dumb question: on these card (or ati hd 3850 or nvidea equivalent) any player can be used to get hw decoding ?

thanks!

BHH

[Blue_MiSfit]

Nope. Cyberlink PowerDVD is the most common choice IIRC. You can get this decoder working in other players, but I'm not aware of any other players that can actually play HD-DVD or BluRay