Nvidia are liars. No H.264 acceleration on Non-SSE2 systems!

[oddball]

I am mad. Really mad. I just purchased a 7600GT AGP for my AMD XP 3200 system on the premise that it would offload some H.264 decoding onto the GPU. The Nvidia cards list this as within their ability and indeed using software that takes advantage of it like Nero ShowTime or Cyberlink's PowerDVD (With AVC support) does do this.

However it does not work on Non-SSE2 systems it would seem.

Looking through over 23 pages of a thread over at Nvidia's forums and a few other places besides it is quite clear this is the case.

So the only alternative to me is to use CoreAVC and hope that when 1.2 is released BetaBoy somehow bypasses this limitation (I have written a thread over at CoreAVC's forums about this) or back the card to the retailer and upgrade my entire system to either an AMD 64 or Intel CoreDuo system at a greatly increased price than I had intended.

Not entirely sure what I should do really. I can playback most stuff I have downloaded including some BBC HD MPEG4 clips. But not all (Anything with MBAFF in it then forget it!). :mad:

[hvatum]

That's pretty annoying, it seems if you had an AMD64 or Core Duo you would probably have the CPU speed to decode H264 without needing to offload onto the GPU anyway. A bit silly if you ask me.

I suppose I agree with you in this case, they are lyres. Otherwise I still like Nvidia though.

[Adub]

I would seriously file a complaint. Personally I am an Ati man myself, but I have heard tempting things from the green field. But this is outrageous!

[ChronoCross]

It's not exactly lying. The XP set of processors outlived their usefullness about 2 years ago. No one ever said that everything has to be backwards compatible with older machines.

For example: vfw is old broken and dumb. newer things shouldn't have to be compatible with it.

Another example (hypothetical): A car runs on air. Does it still have to support gas simply because some people still use it?

Personally you need more help than just upgrading your video card. especially since ALOT of things beenefit from SSE2.

[Manao]

especially since ALOT of things beenefit from SSE2No, a lot of things benefit from SSE2 on intel processors.SSE2, for most AMD 64 / X2 at least, doesn't bring any speed gain in comparison to MMX / iSSE.

[celtic_druid]

The two should be mutually exclusive though. Why should GPU based code require SSE2?

About the car, now if it was something that converted the engine to run off of air, then it would be fair enough if it didn't work with older carburated engines. But in keeping with the GPU analogy, then surely it should be more like something that bolts on and in no way relies on the existing engine. In which case it wouldn't matter if it was an old leaded carburated engine or a modern fuel injected engine. Same should be true of the GPU surely? Even if the gains without SSE2 weren't as impressive as with it. At least they wouldn't be lying.

[CruNcher]

Jep and also the fact that GPU processing is float for Nvidia doesn't justifies the SSE2 usage @ all.
Odball you have to decide now whats better upgrade to SSE2 and be able to use the 7600GT, or buy a dedicated H.264 decoder card that soon become available, wich most probably are gonna outweight Nvidias current H.264 acceleration, but still the major question for wich price :P
Btw i never got Nero Showtime accelleration to work for me neither Mpeg-2 nor H.264 so i can't tell you the difference there so Cyberlinks H.264 (PureVideo) accelleration is still King of the Hill for me, but i doubt for very long now that CoreAVC goes into the second phase wich surely is gonna decide if they go Hardware or not as Nvidias current implementation isn't that much faster wich definetly should change when they gonna move Cabac to the GPU and with a full DXVA 2.0 implementation but for now the Software approach seems better then their wish wash H.264 accelleration. You could easily gain the Speed of Cyberlinks H.264 Decoder by useing CoreAVC + Haalis Renderer for example on capable cards allready.

Here is a small pre test of how the current situation looks for Progressive Source (different complexity levels) Nvidia tough recently improved VMR9 Performance :) also ffdshow (libavcodec ffh264) improved greatly over the time and is king of the hill over comercial software decoders (except CoreAVC) also rumors say that Nero is cooking something up in their labs and it seem they wan't way up that list according to those :)
http://cruncher.mufflastig.com/h264/h264-decoder.txt

[Jay Bee]

I wouldn't buy a GPU for AVC playback since the implementations of HW-decoding are still very poor. The Cyberlink decoder for instance didn't do deblocking last time I checked. Also any serious AVC content (HDTV,BR,HD-DVD) will be a PITA to playback on current PC's due to HDCP. If reencoded DVD's and Apple trailers are what you're looking to playback, CoreAVC should suffice.

And yes, Nvidia are liars. When the GeForce 6 series cards came out about two years ago one of the main advertised features was HW decoding and encoding of ASP,AVC and WMV9. Almost all the GeForce 6 AGP cards do none of this at all and no card to date does any encoding.

[puffpio]

uhhh that's not true

I have an Athlon XP (non SSE2) with a 7800GS and use Nero Showtime...it accelerates H264 just fine.

I use the latest Nero Showtime w/ the latest Nvidia drivers and everything works fine (I think it's enabled by default in the Showtime options, but doublecheck)

[JohnnyFu]

uhhh that's not true

I have an Athlon XP (non SSE2) with a 7800GS and use Nero Showtime...it accelerates H264 just fine.

I use the latest Nero Showtime w/ the latest Nvidia drivers and everything works fine (I think it's enabled by default in the Showtime options, but doublecheck)

You are the first person on this planet with working h.264 AGP/non-sse2 system i have seen. Also i dont know people with working h.264 h/a using NeroShowTime.

Dont trust Nero ShowTime. Just play an ASP file and it shows you (hardware accelerated) too, and that is impossible.

[check]

I would think it's unlikely NVidia have deliberately/maliciously left in a limitation such as this - it would only reduce their market.

[Sulik]

It's most likely related to the client decoder not supporting DXVA on non-SSE2 systems (Cyberlink and/or Nero).

[mike_lee]

I would think it's unlikely NVidia have deliberately/maliciously left in a limitation such as this - it would only reduce their market.

Dude, you can't trust nvidia farther then you can throw them. They misrepresent their product in a routine and systematic way. Joe Blow expects something called a GPU to actually make video easier to render, but nvidia has done a piss poor job of keeping up and virtually everything is still done by the CPU, they overcome this by carefully worded half truths on the retail boxes.

[foxyshadis]

Dude, you can't trust nvidia farther then you can throw them. They misrepresent their product in a routine and systematic way. Joe Blow expects something called a GPU to actually make video easier to render, but nvidia has done a piss poor job of keeping up and virtually everything is still done by the CPU, they overcome this by carefully worded half truths on the retail boxes.
Carefully worded like "Includes HDCP support".

[akupenguin]

It's most likely related to the client decoder not supporting DXVA on non-SSE2 systems.
That would be just as much of an intentional crippling as if nvidia did it. The point of DXVA is that certain computations (i.e. those involving pixels and dct coefficients, which are what benefit from MMX/SSE2) are not done by the CPU at all. If you don't do computations, then you obviously don't need an optimized implementation of them.

[Sulik]

I'm just saying... It seems like the bitching should be directed to Cyberlink/Nero - not NVidia.

[plane]

Looking through over 23 pages of a thread over at Nvidia's forums and a few other places besides it is quite clear this is the case.


Could anyone link the 23 pages? I can't find it on NV forum...my search skill look bad...:angry:

[Jay Bee]

Could anyone link the 23 pages? I can't find it on NV forum...my search skill look bad...:angry:
He probably means this:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=12150

[jok]

Also with the latest 91.47 official driver there is no hardware acceleration for H264 content on AthlonXP system !

Regards,
Jok

[JohnnyFu]

PureVideo HD Beta Driver x86 Edition
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_download...2bit_92.91.html (http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_purevideo_32bit_92.91.html)

PureVideo HD Beta Driver x64 Edition
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_download...4bit_92.91.html (http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_purevideo_64bit_92.91.html)

------------------------
Release Highlights:
------------------------

- PureVideo HD Beta driver with support for the following features:
-- Hardware acceleration of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 HD movie formats.
-- Video post-processing image enhancements.
-- Built-in support for HDCP content protection protocol via DVI or HDMI connectors.
-- Integration with movie player software.
-- PureVideo HD features have been tested with the following GPUs: GeForce 7950 GX2, GeForce 7950 GT, GeForce 7900 GT, GeForce 7900 GS, GeForce 7600 GT
- Includes the new NVIDIA Control Panel.

[jok]

Have you tried them?

I doubt they'll work on no-SSE2 capable CPU.

Regards,
Jok

[Stereodude]

I definitely get hardware acceleration on WMV-HD discs with an overclocked Athlon XP 1700+ and a AGP 6600GT. Are you guys saying this issue is specific to AGP 7x00 series cards, or what?

[oddball]

I am not interested in HD WMV anyhow. Just H.264.

[Stereodude]

I am not interested in HD WMV anyhow. Just H.264.
Yes, I realize that, but most people are saying that all of the acceleration is broken including WMV-HD, H.264, etc. That doesn't seem to be the case.

[Jay Bee]

I definitely get hardware acceleration on WMV-HD discs with an overclocked Athlon XP 1700+ and a AGP 6600GT. Are you guys saying this issue is specific to AGP 7x00 series cards, or what?

Actually WMV acceleration was disabled for all 6600 GT AGP cards from Forceware 8x.xx onwards because of some kind of A/V-synch problem.

[foxyshadis]

That would be the 6800 (entire series), not 6600.

[Jay Bee]

No, for 6800 it never worked. For 6600 GT AGP it worked with some minor problems in 7x.xx drivers. In 8x.xx it was disabled and shortly afterwards removed from here: http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.htm

I just saw that it has actually been added again to the list so maybe they reactivated it in one of the newer drivers. I won't test it though since the 9x.xx drivers break VMR deinterlacing on 6600 GT AGP.

[Stereodude]

I just saw that it has actually been added again to the list so maybe they reactivated it in one of the newer drivers. I won't test it though since the 9x.xx drivers break VMR deinterlacing on 6600 GT AGP.
What part of the VMR deinterlacing isn't working? I just upgraded to the 92.91 beta's and everything seems to be working just like before. The new "edge enhancement" and "noise reduction" adjustments are pretty neat.

[Stereodude]

Actually WMV acceleration was disabled for all 6600 GT AGP cards from Forceware 8x.xx onwards because of some kind of A/V-synch problem.
It works in the 84.21's and 92.91's for me. I was playing back 1080p WMV-HD stuff on my Athlon XP 1.8Ghz "2200+" perfectly with both versions of drivers. If I wasn't getting any acceleration it would be a slideshow.

[Jay Bee]

What part of the VMR deinterlacing isn't working? I just upgraded to the 92.91 beta's and everything seems to be working just like before.

True interlaced PAL sources are deinterlaced to 25 fps instead of 50 fps i.e. the temporal resolution is chopped in half. Probably the same for NTSC.

[Jay Bee]

It works in the 84.21's and 92.91's for me. I was playing back 1080p WMV-HD stuff on my Athlon XP 1.8Ghz "2200+" perfectly with both versions of drivers. If I wasn't getting any acceleration it would be a slideshow.

Odd. It certainly doesn't work with any 8x.xx for me. And I'm not alone: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=12150&st=60

[Stereodude]

Odd. It certainly doesn't work with any 8x.xx for me. And I'm not alone: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=12150&st=60
I've been playing them back smoothly in the nVidia nStant Media application that their purevideo decoder installs. I'll have to try playing them in WMP.

[Stereodude]

True interlaced PAL sources are deinterlaced to 25 fps instead of 50 fps i.e. the temporal resolution is chopped in half. Probably the same for NTSC.
What player are you using, and how are you determining the framerate that you're getting?

[Jay Bee]

Here's one way to test:

-Playback a PAL MPEG-2 file with Zoom Player and Nvida's Purevideo decoder. Make sure that ZP is set to VMR7 or VMR9, not Overlay (Options/Filter Control). Sample clip here (http://rapidshare.de/files/34949643/test_clip.mpg.html).

-Press "I" on the keyboard to open the clip information screen.

-Confirm in this screen that the clip is being played back at 50 fps.

-Close the information screen and pause playback.

-Go forward frame by frame by pressing shift and "." at the same time.

When I do this with 9 series Nvidia drivers I can see that only every second drawn frame is actually a new one. There are always two identical frames before motion occurs i.e. the video is being deinterlaced to 25 fps as if it were film source.

The difference should be quite clearly visable without going through the above procedure though.

[Jay Bee]

I've been playing them back smoothly in the nVidia nStant Media application that their purevideo decoder installs. I'll have to try playing them in WMP.

I just tested the "Step into Liquid" clip from Microsoft's WMVHD site with 84.43. In Zoom Player, WMP and nStant Media my 2.5 GHz Athlon 64 goes to over 90% load.

[Stereodude]

I just tested the "Step into Liquid" clip from Microsoft's WMVHD site with 84.43. In Zoom Player, WMP and nStant Media my 2.5 GHz Athlon 64 goes to over 90% load.
Was that the 720p or the 1080p version?

I'm playing the 1080p ones back very smoothly (from a DVD-Rom drive no less) at about 80-90% CPU on a 1.8GHz Athlon XP. With my last video card I couldn't even play the 720p ones smoothly.

[Jay Bee]

It's 1080p. I agree that an 1.8 GHz Athlon XP shouldn't be able to play it smoothly. Maybe there are differences in revisions within the 6600 GT AGP line.

Have you tried the the deinterlacing in 9x.xx?

[Stereodude]

It's 1080p. I agree that an 1.8 GHz Athlon XP shouldn't be able to play it smoothly. Maybe there are differences in revisions within the 6600 GT AGP line.

Have you tried the the deinterlacing in 9x.xx?
Seems to work fine at least from a visual standpoint. I didn't have much of a chance to mess with it yesterday. I'm going to get into it in more detail today.

The 92.91's have some quirks, but otherwise seem to be working well. The NR adjustment is great.