is this strong enough

[nownot]

i just got my hands on a computer that has a celron d at 2.53 and 2gb of 800mhz pc3200. if i throw a ati 2600 in there agp ( or any other agp video card ), will this be strong enough to do 1080p mkv using coreavc and mpc? i know on the specs sheet it says p4 at 3.0 but i was hoping the lack of horsepower would be made up for by the video card. If anyone has any suggestions pls post, thanks.

[Doom9]

As far as I know (and I just went to their site to check), CoreAVC has no hardware acceleration so your choice of GFX card doesn't matter.

[Sharktooth]

AGP videocards usually do not have HD decoding capabilities. So even if you get a DXVA enabled decoder it wont accelerate anything, so without a combined miracle of all the gods and divinities of all the religions i doubt you can watch 1080p stuff on a 2.5GHz CPU... expecially on a celeron...

[Konrad Klar]

AGP videocards usually do not have HD decoding capabilities.
Not quite true..

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/video-playback2.html

[Sharktooth]

i didnt say "CHEAP"... i said AGP video cards....
also HD2900 and old 8800 (g90) cards are well known for not having good h.264 decoding capabilities.
so what's "Not quite true.." ?

[Konrad Klar]

Ach so. If not cheap HD2600, than maybe HD3850? Not present in test, but available in AGP version.

[Doom9]

I think the idea was to play movies outside of a special player that offers hardware acceleration. Of course, a current generation card will do the job just fine when used with PowerDVD (for instance.. I figure the latest WinDVD or Showtime with HD plugin would, too, ), but if you want to use your own favorite media player, things get a bit more tricky.

[Sharktooth]

Ach so. If not cheap HD2600, than maybe HD3850? Not present in test, but available in AGP version.
Dunno, but seems both ATi and nVidia offer limited video decoding acceleration on AGP cards even if the GPU can do the job without problems...

[Konrad Klar]

Interesting. I did not know that. And it sounds a bit strange.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Might the limitation be the AGP bus' asymetric upload / download speeds?

~MiSfit

[Sharktooth]

it could be... but AGP is not slow at all...

[Blue_MiSfit]

Well thats true, but it's only quick in one direction - system -> GPU. The other direction is hideously slow IIRC.

Don't quote me on it :)

It's very possible the lack of full decode capabilities are an artificial limitation imposed by ATi/AMD, but I wonder why they would purposely gimp hardware for an older platform? They sell a card either way...

Oh well ;)

~MiSfit

[Sharktooth]

to force you to buy new hardware so they will focus just on one "standard"...
however, this is speculation. the problem could be really due to the AGP limitations.

[Blue_MiSfit]

My guess is a combination of both. I bet it works on AGP, but not perfectly, so they gimp the product to look good and boost sales of more modern (cheaper for them to produce bc there's no bridge chip) cards.

Just my 5 cents. I think we've speculated this issue to death.

~MiSfit

[Gawwad]

i believe you can play 1080p content on an old computer (not too old though!) with ati 2600 agp, providing you use the the right software (such as PowerDVD 7 Ultra)

i almost did it with this ancient computer over here:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136864