nvidia drivers with support for h.264 decoding

[Sharktooth]

Ok, to all those lucky owners of a Nvidia GF7800 card here are the firts drivers that supports h.264 HARDWARE decoding:
http://www.3dchipset.com/drivers/nvidia/beta/nt5/8040.php
Some report would be appreciated :)

[acidsex]

I would love to have one of these cards but man, $600US is way too much to spend on a video card. Now if it were a H.264 set top player, Id be all over it.

[Sharktooth]

well... someone may had it for testing or reviewing...
that's why i said "lucky"... :D

[Doom9]

I almost got one (they just became available when I placed my order), but with the price of current X2 chips I settled for getting the extremely expensive CPU and stick to a normal GFX card (6600GT).

[peteag]

I heard the 6xxx series may be also able to play h.264 content with hardware accelerated decoding. because it has this programmable video-processor o.s. is that true?

[Doom9]

time will tell I guess.. they are capable of video acceleration, but Purevideo hasn't been a hit so far (I'm not even sure it's available in any software at this time).

[Selur]

decoding support with 6600GT (got one too) would be nice,..

Cu Selur

[guada 2]

These are good news. But what makes ATI?
would someone have informations?

[DeeGee]

Does any h.264 player take advantage of this yet? If the drivers/hardware has the support, it isn't enough if any program doesn't use the feature.

[Sirber]

Should be a special dshow driver that will be used instead of ffdshow. Same thing for my MPEG2 HW accelerated decoding on my ATI.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Does anybody know whether the new drivers only offer Mpeg4 AVC hardware acceleration.

It would be nice to think that all forms of Mpeg4 could benefit by being hardware accelerated too!


Cheers

[Sharktooth]

Since those are beta drivers there are no info about them... however, in theory, even the 6xxx series should be able to decode h.264

[Mug Funky]

here's hoping for some haxx0red geforce drivers then... i just got a 6600GT but haven't yet got a mobo to slot the thing into yet.

[Joe Fenton]

Well, I use an nVidia GeForce FX5600 in linux (64bit), and the nVidia drivers together with xine do hardware acceleration of playback for MPEG2 and MPEG4 ASP (xvid/divx). I don't know if any acceleration of AVC is possible or planned, but I doubt that is possible on a card this old.

[bill_baroud]

Well, I use an nVidia GeForce FX5600 in linux (64bit), and the nVidia drivers together with xine do hardware acceleration of playback for MPEG2 and MPEG4 ASP (xvid/divx).

More information on that ? i really doubt about it, but oh well, if you have some proof/documentation....

[plonk420]

I almost got one (they just became available when I placed my order), but with the price of current X2 chips I settled for getting the extremely expensive CPU and stick to a normal GFX card (6600GT).

good choice, as it at LEAST supports WMV9 accelleration

time will tell I guess.. they are capable of video acceleration, but Purevideo hasn't been a hit so far (I'm not even sure it's available in any software at this time).

http://nvidia.com/page/purevideo.html ... been out for a while and anand has even tested out the decoding/deinterlacing capabilities. it seems to be the best one out there, not to mention best WMV9 accelleration out there...

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2305
and more specifically
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2305&p=9

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[SeeMoreDigital]

Personally speaking, I'm not that interested with the hardware acceleration capabilities of high-def WMV9 (VC1)

Hardware acceleration of MPEG-2 content is welcome, but hardware acceleration of MPEG-4 SP, ASP and AVC is a must ;)


Cheers

[nm]

Well, I use an nVidia GeForce FX5600 in linux (64bit), and the nVidia drivers together with xine do hardware acceleration of playback for MPEG2 and MPEG4 ASP (xvid/divx).

You probably mean XVideo (Xv) "acceleration" which is supported by most modern cards (although usable drivers may not be available). In practice Xv only does colorspace conversions and scaling on the graphics hardware. This means that it speeds up the processing done _after_ decoding the video: it handles pushing the raw frames to the screen. I'm unfamiliar with the acceleration architecture on Windows, but I guess the same thing is done there by some DirectX video surface.

NVidia also supports XVideo Motion Compensation (XvMC) in their newer cards (>GeForce 4) and drivers. XvMC accelerates only MPEG1 and MPEG2 video and is therefore useful for HDTV decoding, but hardly anything else. It can't be used to speed up MPEG4 decoding:

http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2005-June/053611.html

So the new MPEG4 acceleration is probably restricted to the newest GPUs, but time will tell if MPlayer developers or other Linux folks come up with hacks for the older cards.

EDIT: Forgot to mention scaling.

[iceloki]

What's the interface of the H.264 decoding? As I know, currently DXVA does not support H.264 like support, so maybe NV defined their own interface at driver level?

[frodoontop]

Why should this be so important? On my Sempron 2600 I can easily decode h264 stuff. Maybe insane resolutions that are higher than my monitor can handle anyway are too heavy.

In a resolution of 640x480 it only takes about 45-55% of processor power with mplayer (in linux). For the amount of money this card costs one can better invest in a faster cpu.

[Sharktooth]

Try with HD... :p
It's always better having decentralized tasks and dedicated processors.
If nvidia and ati have h.264 decoding it's a good thing. why should we care you dont like it?

[bill_baroud]

Try to decode, at least, a 720p (1280x720x25) stream with your sempron .... that's my "goal" with H264, for SD resolution, I used xvid for years and am pleased with the quality/size, so i stick with it.

with a K7 @ 2200mhz, i'm barely playing a h264 file, like at 21fps... so a little push from the graphic card wouldn't hurt at all.

But i'm not waiting nvidia for that... i know that Santa Claus doesn't exist :o !

[lar1r]

I tried the driver and it did nothing for the 7800.
Looks like a decoder will have to be specially made.

Only the GeForce 7 series will get h.264 acceleration.
NVIDIA stated on Anandtech this will be out by Christmas 2005

As for ATI - they demoed it on a R520 using a upcoming build of PowerDVD I believe.

Yes HD is the magic resolution up to 20Mbit bit rates that will need acceleration.
Nero's recent High Profile though shows that you may be able to circumvent this high bitrate with a really good encoder.

[Inventive Software]

Has anybody tried decoding a 720p H.264 stream with 2 processors or a dual-core processor? It should be possible.

I'd like to see H.264 encode a 1080p stream in real-time, and decode it with 75% or less CPU usage.

But methinks that's way off into the very distant future.

What about the Cell and H.264? If the PS3 supports Blu-Ray, then chances are it supports H.264 decoding. Whether it's 720p, 720i, 1080p or 1080i remains to be decided.

[bill_baroud]

?? the Cell is a processor, so you can program anything on it, if you want to write a H264 decoder for Cell go ahead and use one or more of the SPE .... it's "like" using the MMX/SSE register of a pentium... just an architecture optimization. There won't be any hardwired function in the Cell for video decoding. (Unless you call something like Altivec an hardware acceleration)

[sjchmura]

ANY news or rumors on this hardware decoding. THere were posts on so many sites then - just ended :(