We've been hearing for quite some time now that Blu-ray and HDDVD movies could prove to be too much for today's desktop microprocessors; today we finally have the proof. X-Men: The Last Stand encoded using the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile at 1080p requires more processing power to decode than affordable dual core CPUs can handle. We are at a point where GPU decode acceleration is essentially required with all but the highest end processors in order to achieve an acceptable level of quality while watching HD content on the PC.

NVIDIA hardware performs better under our current set of drivers and the beta build of PowerDVD we are using, but exactly how well GeForce 7 Series hardware handles the decode process is more dependant on the type of card being used than ATI. In general, higher performance NVIDIA cards do better at decoding our H.264 Blu-ray content. The 7950 GX2 doesn't perform on par with the rest of the high end NVIDIA cards as SLI doesn't help with video decode. With the exception of the X1600 Pro, each of the ATI cards we tested affected performance almost exactly the same.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2886&p=4

If a Core Duo E6400 2.13 GHz with is good enough, I hope my Core 2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz is also good enough. My T7400 has twice the L2 cache (4 MB vs. 2 MB), but it has a much slower bus (667 MHz instead of 800 MHz).

(P.S. I wasn't sure if this belonged here, or in an HTPC forum.)

It is basically back to when DVD required dedicated hardware to decode the mpeg2 stream on most pc's. That didn't last long. Give it a year and it will probably be a non-issue.

As someone else pointed to a dell laptop with BD-re burner showed, that laptop ships with a T7600 waaaay faster than last months flavor for laptops.

This time next year, processor speed will probably almost double again. You can thank Moore's Law for that.

The Intel E6300 might be a good choice with the right motherboard and ram as they are highly overclockable. And with the right motherboard, the quad cores are a possible upgrade path.

I think you don't need as much horsepower as they say. What's on the inside of a PS3?

A 3.2 GHz processor. People have benchmarked dual core 2.66 GHz dual cores as faster than 3.0 GHz processors. With that in mind, I firmly believe any dual core can handle it. No SLI or Crossfire needed, a simple video card at PCIe 16x should be fine.

anyone see this?

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=765633

Intel 900, 0 cache, 400 Mhz fsb

I think you don't need as much horsepower as they say. What's on the inside of a PS3?

A 3.2 GHz processor. People have benchmarked dual core 2.66 GHz dual cores as faster than 3.0 GHz processors. With that in mind, I firmly believe any dual core can handle it. No SLI or Crossfire needed, a simple video card at PCIe 16x should be fine.
yes, with 8 cores :-).

And it is using 3 of them to play Blu-Ray... Plus, it is a lot more poweful than your dual core pentium, as it is completly different design...

As someone else pointed to a dell laptop with BD-re burner showed, that laptop ships with a T7600 waaaay faster than last months flavor for laptops.

This time next year, processor speed will probably almost double again. You can thank Moore's Law for that.

And you would be completely wrong. Moore's Law has basically hit a brick wall. You won't really be seeing clock speeds going up anymore, at this point you'll be seeing numerous cores on a single chip.

PS3 doesn't have 8 cores....I remember correctly they lowered it to what 6 or 7 cores due to yield problems. The PS3 cpu is a huge beast...and when you make the physical chip bigger you introduce more possible flaw areas which isn't good for production.

Ah BS. CoreAVC can do it, no problem. I guarantee it.

Nero Showtime 3.x.x.+ is pretty effecient as well.

yes, with 8 cores :-).

And it is using 3 of them to play Blu-Ray... Plus, it is a lot more poweful than your dual core pentium, as it is completly different design...

Actually, it has one PPE and seven SPE's it's not seven cores, cell pros don't have true cores. If you want to say it has cores, then it has one true core, with attached mini-cores. The ratings are a little misleading as well. Sony themselves say the system is good for around 2 TFLOPS:

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/050517e.pdf

If that's the case, then the mid-level AMD 64, and Opteron pro's can keep up with it with a single core!!!!!!


They said you needed a 2.4 GHz processor to record or watch HDTV. I have an Athlon XP 2100+ with an ADS Instant HDTV Tuner PCI Card that records and plays HDTV just fine.

And you would be completely wrong. Moore's Law has basically hit a brick wall. You won't really be seeing clock speeds going up anymore, at this point you'll be seeing numerous cores on a single chip.

PS3 doesn't have 8 cores....I remember correctly they lowered it to what 6 or 7 cores due to yield problems. The PS3 cpu is a huge beast...and when you make the physical chip bigger you introduce more possible flaw areas which isn't good for production.
Moore's law is not about clock speed. It's about the number of transistors in an integrated circuit for a given cost.

From wiki:
Moore's Law is the empirical observation made in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. It is attributed to Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder of Intel.

Intel pushed clock speeds to new heights with its "netburst" architecture. This was accomplished mainly with long pipelines, which allowed much higher clock speeds, but had their own set of problems. Netburst was a flawed response to AMD after they beat Intel to the 1GHz mark with the Athlon.

He's correct. And with dual core CPUs, they are probably still mostly on track with Moore's law.

See http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/index.htm

Cell has 8 SPEs, actually, but the PS3 only uses 7 of them (to increase the yield). And Moore's Law was never "real," anyway. It's always been a bunch of crap - an approximate observation over a finite amount of time somehow got labelled as a "law"?

However, Intel and IBM have features coming in their 45nm processes for 2007 that will allow clock speed to scale up. It won't double, but it has not hit a brick wall. 32nm from Intel in 2009 is when things really get interesting...

I haven't had any problems playing H.264 content with my 24" iMac. It has the T7600 (2.33) C2D processor and 7600GT video card.

Ah BS. CoreAVC can do it, no problem. I guarantee it.

Nero Showtime 3.x.x.+ is pretty effecient as well.


Excellent info. People tend to get lost in the horsepower debate with decoding. It's the evolution of decoder(s)/codec(s) that will make the biggest impact on the reducing the dependency of the cpu and gpu to playback a file.

Actually, it has one PPE and seven SPE's it's not seven cores, cell pros don't have true cores. If you want to say it has cores, then it has one true core, with attached mini-cores. The ratings are a little misleading as well. Sony themselves say the system is good for around 2 TFLOPS:

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/050517e.pdf

If that's the case, then the mid-level AMD 64, and Opteron pro's can keep up with it with a single core!!!!!!


They said you needed a 2.4 GHz processor to record or watch HDTV. I have an Athlon XP 2100+ with an ADS Instant HDTV Tuner PCI Card that records and plays HDTV just fine.

And the single core it does have runs at a reduced speed. Why Sony chose this route is still beyond me. The 360 uses 3 general purpose 3.2 GHz cores that also run at a reduced speed.

I imagine a lot of BD playback is handled by the GPU and/or maybe a hardware decoder that many of the current HD-DVD and BD players use.

Supposedly, the newest libavcodec versions are almost as fast as software-based CoreAVC.

Are these data streams from HD/Blu disks harder to decode than WMVHD and MP4 from NeroDigital? My Athlon 64 4000 and 7800 GT don't have any problems displaying HD from those forms.

It looks like we need faster GPUs :)

It looks like we need faster GPUs :)



If history is any indicator you will be able to use less powerful components and have lower cpu/gpu usage because codec support and quality will only get better as time goes by.


But by all means go spend $500 on a video card today that won't be effectively/efficiently utilized until 6 months down the road when it costs $250.

I don't quite follow this report. As long as your CPU utilization never reaches 100% (meaning it can't keep up) then where's the problem?

I don't quite follow this report. As long as your CPU utilization never reaches 100% (meaning it can't keep up) then where's the problem?

In the test, the processor X6800 is a $1000 CPU, and the 8000GTX is over $600. I think the point is the cost of doing this is high right now, and many people wouldn't have these configurations. Also, future releases could have higher bitrates requiring even more power.

Although in 6-12 months, the power will be more affordable.

But an E6700 is only $500, and that passed the test without any video acceleration at all.

You will never need an E6700 with H.264, even with no GPU acceleration. My Athlon 64 3700+ played 1080p H.264 just fine. The Cyberlink decoder they used is simply TERRIBLE (in speed) in software mode. An E6300 will play 1080p H.264 in software mode with libavcodec or CoreAVC easily.

You will never need an E6700 with H.264, even with no GPU acceleration. My Athlon 64 3700+ played 1080p H.264 just fineWhat source? Is that High Profile? H.264 SP often used in those quicktime trailers are of course can be played on a CPU, but you can't play 40Mbit H.264 (High Profile) without GPU acceleration.

I think you don't need as much horsepower as they say. What's on the inside of a PS3?

A 3.2 GHz processor. People have benchmarked dual core 2.66 GHz dual cores as faster than 3.0 GHz processors. With that in mind, I firmly believe any dual core can handle it. No SLI or Crossfire needed, a simple video card at PCIe 16x should be fine.

I agree. It's a GPU issue mostly.

DonoMan is right. Many h.264 software decoders that are out right now are not very optimized. Quicktime 7 for Windows comes to mind. Using such software many people get a false impression that 1080p24 h.264 is impossible to run smoothly on modern PC hardware without hardware acceleration. Optimized x86 h.264 decoders are 2-3x as fast as the slower ones. What these sites end up testing is how good of an implementation they are using. The coreavc devs have already stated they are planning to add AACS in the future specs.

Someone on these boards tested a demo disk with some 1080p h.264 high profile encodes that had spikes up to 40 mbit/sec. They all played back perfectly with no dropped frames on a 1.8Ghz e6300 core2 duo system.

Hopefully the commercial vendors will work to speed up their software so people do not have to waste their money on extra hardware.

Nvidia has their PureVideo HD decoder that is supposed to allow most 7000 series cards and up to be able to support Blu-ray and HD-DVD. I think you have to have a 7600GT or higher to have the GPU acceleration needed to decode the full bandwidth.

To see if your video card is up to snuff, check this chart below:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

6600GT works too, but 6800 is supposedly broken.

Nvidia has their PureVideo HD decoder that is supposed to allow most 7000 series cards and up to be able to support Blu-ray and HD-DVD. I think you have to have a 7600GT or higher to have the GPU acceleration needed to decode the full bandwidth.

To see if your video card is up to snuff, check this chart below:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

By all account, nVidia won't have a Purevideo HD decoder. For Blu-ray and HD-DVD playback nVidia won't have their own player was what I read. By Purevideo HD they just mean the decode acceleration of the 7 series and HDCP support.

If Purevideo is not a decoder, what is it and why would you pay Nvidia $20-$50 for it?

I was looking around AVS when I saw this thread and decided to update it with some recent information from tomshardware on the current state of GPU's. Check out the performance of the new cards on Vista decoding H.264. The CPU usage is down at 20%.

From the tomshardware page, look for the Avivo vs. Purevideo HD review and go to page 11.

My plan is to use a mobile chip (T7200) on an Asus N4L-VM DH with an 8600GTS (lower power / less cooling / more silent setup). But, I'll most likely wait for the new new ATI HD cards to hit the street to see how they compare.

It seems we might be on the cusp of a new HD HTPC era.

I haven't had any problems playing H.264 content with my 24" iMac. It has the T7600 (2.33) C2D processor and 7600GT video card.

You are not playing the same high profile H.264 used in Bluray, you are using the main profile that Quicktime supports. I don't think Quicktime even supports high profile with 40+ Mbps bit rate.