NVIDIA Enables PureVideo on GeForce 6 GPUs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 20, 2004 1:22 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
HD Decode Performance
The other aspect of PureVideo that matters is its decode acceleration. DVD decoding isn't really an issue these days, as even the slowest CPUs are powerful enough to handle DVD decoding - the new stress test is decoding of HD content. We used Windows Media Player 10 and the publicly available Terminator 2 trailers in 720p and 1080p formats. However because our test bed was limited to 1600 x 1200, the 1080p test was fairly useless as we were resolution bound on the machine, making the 720p test much more stressful.
We measured average, minimum and maximum CPU utilization over the entire 1:59 trailer. Our test bed was an Intel Pentium 4 570J (3.8GHz), however higher CPU utilizations on this test bed will translate into proportionally higher CPU utilizations on slower CPUs. We tested in both Overlay and VMR9 modes, the latter being directly applicable to Windows XP Media Center Edition as it uses VMR9 exclusively.
In Overlay mode in a window, ATI has significantly lower CPU utilization:
| WMV9 CPU Utilization (Lower is Better) - Overlay Window - 720p Terminator Trailer | |||
| Minimum | Average | Maximum | |
| ATI | 9.4 | 22 | 35.2 |
| NVIDIA | 14.8 | 28.3 | 40.6 |
| WMV9 CPU Utilization (Lower is Better) - Overlay Full Screen - 720p Terminator Trailer | |||
| Minimum | Average | Maximum | |
| ATI | 11.7 | 22.3 | 33.6 |
| NVIDIA | 25 | 37.7 | 46.9 |
ATI sees a very small performance penalty when scaling up to full screen, while NVIDIA faces a huge performance penalty in full screen mode. VMR9 is much more stressful on ATI than it is on NVIDIA, the winner here is NVIDIA.
| WMV9 CPU Utilization (Lower is Better) - VMR9 Window - 720p Terminator Trailer | |||
| Minimum | Average | Maximum | |
| ATI | 28.9 | 41.4 | 50.8 |
| NVIDIA | 15.6 | 26.6 | 40.6 |
| WMV9 CPU Utilization (Lower is Better) - VMR9 Full Screen - 720p Terminator Trailer | |||
| Minimum | Average | Maximum | |
| ATI | 31.3 | 42.2 | 50 |
| NVIDIA | 20.3 | 38.5 | 50.8 |
Even in full screen mode, NVIDIA is able to offer slightly lower CPU utilization than ATI.
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mcveigh - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
nserra: where do you get your info on mpg4 from?tfranzese - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
I guess giving you the hardware features now means you should be entitled to the software to take advantage of it as well, huh?Those of you who think you're entitled to nVidia's DVD decoder are living in la la land. So now they should also give you the games that take advantage of their technology/features too?
Koing - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
Just don't buy an Nvidia card next time if you feel ripped off.You paid 'expecting' a feature to be 'fully' and not half 'assed' in to work 8 months late.
Protest with your WALLETS.
<-- never an early graphics adopter!
Still with my Nvidia GF4Ti4200 :P
Koing
nserra - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
http://www.ati.com/vortal/videoinnovations/flash/i...#29 VIRGE
Ati have MPEG4 encoding and decoding since 18/07/2002 so what do you want?
S3 Omni is better at video then Ati of Nvidia the problem is the rest.... even so, to bad there isnt an S3 in the tests.
I dont know why nvidia doesnt charge some buck or two for each chip/card it makes, so the feature get paied?
Unless this enconder software that they are charging, works on any card in the market, if its the case they are right in doing so.
LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
Anand,I think you would do your readers a great service by retesting all of this on an AMD processor. Your Pentium 4 rig had Hyperthreading on, making this issue look far les serious than it is. Hyperthreading P4 chips report far lower CPU utilization numbers as opposed to even high-level Athlon 64 processors. So those of us with a Geforce 6800 who are running high-end AMD hardware are getting 70-100% CPU utilization in WMV9. It explains why a lot of us are having trouble trusting nVidia now, and in the future.
atssaym - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
NVDVD =/= NVIDIA DVD Decoder, they are TWO DIFFERENT THINGSlink
http://nvidia.com/object/decoder_faq.html#othernv
Will this product work with NVDVD and ForceWare Multimedia?
The new software will upgrade the decoders in ForceWare Multimedia 3.0 to access the new features in the NVIDIA DVD Decoder. The NVIDIA DVD Decoder will not upgrade NVDVD 2.0 as it was a separate application based upon an old architecture.
Decoder Homepage
http://nvidia.com/object/dvd_decoder.html
NVDVD Homepage
http://nvidia.com/page/nvdvd.html
pataykhan - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
Nice comparison of ATI and NVIDIABut still one thing is missing. I use cyberlink powerdvd for watching dvds. My question is that if i have got nvidia or ati dvd decoder. Should i use hardware accelerated decoder or should i stick with cyberlink decoder.
Cyberlink has implemented some smart software deinterlacer and image quality enhancer (CLEV-2). So i would like to see the image quality differences between hardware/software decoders available.
bigpow - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
This sucks...ATI doesn't charge $20 for the claimed decoder/accelerator...
And they have the ATI HD component dongle too!
segagenesis - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link
Bah, I would be kind of pissed if I had a high end $500 card only to find out now its more worthless than a sub $200 card at decoding video. A bit of shame on nVidia.Guspaz - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
Oh, as a clarification of my previous comment (#41) I meant that I was under the impression that normally the DVD decoding software handled the de-interlacing, obviously PureVideo overrides that. But what I mean is on ATI cards, without any type of hardware de-interlacing, wouldn't the deinterlacing differ from decoder to decoder?