Radeon upgrade

[Spud]

Hello All,

Somebody here might be able to advise me.

I use my HTPC ( P4 3.2GHz WinXP ) mainly for HD viewing and sometimes DVD.

Until now I have used a Radeon 9200SE and InterVideo Decoders with DXVA and HWMC enabled in the registry. This combination has been great especially with interlaced HD from HD1, very smooth when the camera swings quickly left and right as in sports scenes (both fields of the 50 fields per second are displayed) I tried numerous decoders without Hardware acceleration and nothing can hold candle light to the above combination. There was one minor drawback, sometimes the image would shiver up and down vertically. as if the field dominance had reversed. This only affected my CRT monitor on the VGA output but My projector on the DVI output was not affected with this problem.

Lately a number of people have said to me 9200!!! that is a bit under powered, you should have a 9700 or 9800. Last week I gave in and got a PEAK Radeon 9800SE 256MB. When I use the Intervideo decoder the PC crashes and reboots. Disabling DXVA in the registry fixes the problem. HWMC enabled or disabled makes no difference. The CPU usage with the 9200 was about 12% with HD video and about 33% for the 9800. My 3 possible conclusions:

1. The 9800SE chipset in general does not support DXVA or HWMC.

2. The PEAK implementation of 9800SE does not support DXVA or HWMC.

3. I have a problem with the upgrade installation.

Any advice would be appreciated. I did a search on this forum and found some references to IDCT acceleration, this might solve my problem if I knew how to enable it. Incidentlly, in the slow moving HD scenes I think the 9800 might be a bit better than the 9200. I didn't throw out the 9200, it is on standby in case all else fails.

Thanks.

 

Jim.

[Hartwig]

iDCT must done every time on decoding the video. If you enable DXVA, you instruct your gfxcard to do this instead of the CPU.

[Spud]

Thanks Hartwig, You are telling me that from the users point of view IDCT and DXVA are the same thing. I still don't know if the 9800 supports DXVA and HWMC, someone with a 9800 might be able to advise me. Thanks again.

 

Jim

[Griga]

I still don't know if the 9800 supports DXVA and HWMC

 

Of course it does. Otherwise the Intervideo wouldn't crash. The DXVA/IDCT registry setting wouldn't do anything.

 

Search the web, if you don't believe it. Ask Google for "Radeon", "9800", "IDCT" - you'll find sites like this one.

 

I guess it's a driver related issue. Are you using the latest Radeon driver version? If yes, you might try an older one... what about other DXVA-capable video decoders? Do they crash too? E.g. you could try the latest Cyberlink PowerDVD 6 Trial - the video decoder (a quite good one) can be extracted, registered and used separately after uninstalling PowerDVD.

 

BTW: DXVA is "DirectX Video Acceleration". Some interface provided by DirectX for accessing driver capabilities. IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transformation) and HWMC (Hardware Motion Compensation) are the most important for MPEG2 decoding, since they require time-consuming calculations. Graphics card manufacturers implement it as "mathematical algorithms", thus avoiding to pay MPEG2 licence fees.

[Spud]

Thanks Griga, It was a driver issue. I had suspected this myself but first I was trying to confirm that the 9800 supported hardware acceleration. I had downloaded the latest driver file from ATI (30Mb) and used it rather than the disc that came with the card. I just uninstalled now and installed the version on the disc and acceleration is working. The HD picture quality doesn't look any better than the 9200. I am loosing count of the number of beers I owe you now.

By the way while I was testing I came across a news item, I will post it in the HD section.

 

Jim

[Griga]

The HD picture quality doesn't look any better than the 9200.

 

That's what I expected. Those high-end-cards are good for gamers, but don't yield much profit for DVBViewers...

[Guest Lars_MQ]

Yeah, they concentrate more on rendering the 3D boobs of lara croft in HD instead of working on the videocapabilities.

You simply don't need a fillrate of 50 Mio. or so polygons/s to view a video

[KGM11]

And even if he was a gamer, the 9800SE doesn't really seem to be a worthwile upgrade as it is a crippled 9800/Pro (less pipelines, half the memory bandwidth) and in stock condition delivers 9600Pro-like performance at best.