Good news from ATI...

[vortex_hl]

ATI's forthcoming VPU "R520" support hardware accelerated H.264/AVC decoding, X-bitlabs (http://www.xbitlabs.com) said.

Read full news here (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20050526100319.html).

[Selur]

hardware accelerated H.264/AVC decoding sounds nice :D

[buzzqw]

even accelerate encoding would be sound nice :D

BHH

[bill_baroud]

well they said the same for the the NV3x and at the end even the first generation of NV4x didn't even have a proper wmv9 decoding. Somehow the H264 support disappeared when the wmv9 support was implemented in the FX6600 ... I won't hold my breath waiting for it. But at least ATI have some previous record on the subject (first on the mpeg2 decoding).

[Sirber]

accelerating is always nice... but new VPUs are SO expensive :(

[CruNcher]

Yep and it's really hard to keep pace with the developing the lifetime of a GPU is so short these days you would end up never buying a new one my generation is r360 ATI i think r520 is gonna be the next i'll buy or maybe G70 :P, but for sure it will be the one with confirmed AVC/H264 HD-DVD support but i doubt that Nvidia won't include AVC/H264 HD-DVD it's to important for the 2D World at the moment :)

[Rumbah]

Hardware support for video decoding is great, but the main problem will be if there is any software that uses it. And in the past that was the biggest problem.

[Sirber]

HW decoding require special drivers. For exemple, I have to force ATI Mpeg Decoder to get HW MPEG2 decoding. Not any application can use it.

[iwod]

wasn't their another article said something about Hardware encoding as well?

[mojolo]

Linky (http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2433) to anandtech's preview of the r520 at Computex.

looks pretty impressive decoding-wise. don't really see encoding acceleration.

the following statement seems interesting, although vague, for us current Radeon owners:

ATI said they were looking into bringing the acceleration to older GPUs, but they would not say anything beyond that.

[DeathTheSheep]

I would think that on newer machines (over 3ghz intel or 33000+ amd) the acceleration would be nice. But yes, it would be rather expensive.

If you knew driver coding, though, couldn't you find a way to use an older chip to "assist" in decoding AVC? Or is the process handled fully by the chip without software intervention?

[mojolo]

From doom9's news on 3/6:
"...Then I got an email from an ATI PR rep about MPEG encoding and decoding support in GFX card. It appears that ATIs Radeon 9800 contains hardware DCT and iDCT blocks that can be used for MPEG-2/4 encoding and decoding. Furthermore, the chip does also support WMV9 decoding. However, at this point I'm still waiting to get a link to an official documentation on those features as the ATI website only mentions MPEG-2 decoding acceleration in the Radeon 9800 specs."I don't know about the MPEG-4 encoding or decoding, but there is a reg hack that will make a tick box show up in the Radeon driver properties page. You can just tick to enable HW WMV9 decoding. There are reports that it's not perfect though, eg garbled video.

Here (http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articleid=615) is a link (go to the 3rd page of the comparison) to a comparison of ATI's WMV9 HW decoding and Nvidia's PureVideo HW WMV9 decoding. PureVideo is the winner, but not by much.

with more than a bit of luck, hopefully ATI will be able to program the chip to do h.264.