Good hardware h.264 decoding

[legoman666]

Anandtech just put up a good review of the GeForce 8500/8600 which has hardware h.264 decoding, savign up your cpu to do other things. Looks pretty nice.
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2977

I'll probably pick up the 8500 for my htpc since the cpu (2800+ sempron, only $35) struggles sometimes with 720p h.264 and can't do 1080p h.264 at all.

[Awatef]

Very interesting indeed!
If only someone could compare CoreAVC's performance with that of these GeForce cards...
I also wonder how the new ATi cards will perform. The new Radeon HD2900XT proved to be up to 30% faster than the GeForce 8800GTS in 3D. I'm sure eager to see if ATi has done something about H.264 decoding...

[burfadel]

The Geforce 7600, 7800 series etc have hardware h.264 decoding as well:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/7_series_techspecs.html

Its just not utilised that well!

Now before I have my head bitten off, there's no reason why a 7600 or 7800 can't decode HD material! Its true that the 8500/8600 has the whole decoder path covered by specific hardware, further reducing CPU load over that of the same system with a 7600 etc installed. My point, and I may be wrong, is that pixel shaders can be used for the same purpose and are programmable and thus, can be used for decoding and encoding of other media formats as well. The use of specialist hardware is beneficial because it free's the video card for other tasks... but what other tasks would you be doing?! I guess you could watch a movie on one screen and play a game on another :)

[foxyshadis]

Very interesting indeed!
If only someone could compare CoreAVC's performance with that of these GeForce cards...

You can't really directly compare framerates of two things that use totally different pieces of hardware, but if nvidia can decode a full 50Mbps 1080p plus deinterlacing, in a cheap 8500, it would make a lot of sense on systems that just don't have the CPU to run coreavc.

[Awatef]

@ burfadel
If I understood well, ATi is using the pixel shaders to accelerate the decoding process, but as you can see, the performance is not even up to CoreAVC's.

@foxy
I guess since CoreAVC is slighly slower than PowerDVD w/ GeForce 7, the GeForce 8500 wins it all.
Performance comparison would be in done in terms of CPU load anyway, that's what counts in the end I guess.

[arfster]

You can't really directly compare framerates of two things that use totally different pieces of hardware, but if nvidia can decode a full 50Mbps 1080p plus deinterlacing, in a cheap 8500, it would make a lot of sense on systems that just don't have the CPU to run coreavc.

Dunno quite that much, but it can do spatial-temp deinterlacing on 35mbit AVC (the highest bitrate interlaced material I've got).