EDIT: Some quick links and info: (I'm going to keep updating this over the next couple of days...)
SPECIAL THANKS to Arfster, exDeus, ToughRowToHoe, and others who have offered valuable info and answered hundreds of posts!

Arfster's summary post of Reg Tweaks:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=11659897&postcount=2121
as well from exDeus
http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/ati-hd2x00/

ExDeus' Reg Tweaks Script:
http://home.comcast.net/~exdeus/ati-hd2x00/

x.264/H.264 info:
- tetsuo55 found some info on x264(encoder)/MKV/20fps bug over at Doom9:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=132924
Arfster - "...The PDVD codec supports acceleration for all h264, except those that use extreme settings such as >4 ref frames (and some other stuff, someone a few pages back figured out exactly what). Unfortunately this includes most x264 encodes."
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=12473507#post12473507
- DJBlu's x264 encoding tips: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=12449406#post12449406

----------------------------------------------------

Audio related:
ToughRowToHoe - http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=12449880&postcount=3527
ToughRowToHoe - http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=12449880#post12449880

"...ATI Knowledge Base Answer: 737-28867
In order to enable HDMI support on the Radeon™ HD 2000 series board through the DVI connector, AMD has designed a unique DVI-HDMI adapter..."

- remember to set your audio output device in control panel/sounds and audio devices/audio, look for 'ATI' and 'HDMI' if thats what you want

----------------------------------------------------

General Info: (UNDER CONSTRUCTION! I'm going through the forum backwards...)

Drivers:
- install your manfacturer's drivers FIRST (included CD, etc), then get any ATI updates. Manfuacturer's drivers many include HDMI sound driver/AVIVO, which ATI drivers many not (at least, this is the case for my Asus 2600Pro)

Latest public drivers from ATI:
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx



Radeon 2400's:
- Good for general HD disk playback (HD DVD, Blu-ray, 1080p, note: some disks are only 1080i, see below)
- Not great at 1080i (broadcasts/satellite/some HD disks), has problems deinterlacing

Radeon 2600's:
- Good for general HD disk playback (HD DVD, Blu-ray, 1080p)
- Can handle 1080i deinterlacing as well

AGP:
DPlettner - "...HA is not broken for all AGP owners. VC1 and AVC acceleration works great for me (both HD DVD and Blu-ray) on an old nForce2 AMD 3200+ AGP PC. However, for driver versions at 7.9 and above..."
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=12545542#post12545542
some more info: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=12361175#post12361175

Tips on AGP installation:
http://home.comcast.net/~exdeus/ati-hd2x00/#AGP

More tips/info regarding AGP:
added 02/08/08: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=12670195&postcount=3846
added 02/08/08: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=12844770#post128447704



PowerDVD tips:
- some options/checkboxes under configuration only appear while playing HD; DTS downmixing, etc


-------------------------------------------------------------

Hi All,

I thought that now that the lower end cards are starting to show up, we should start a dedicated thread for performance, issues and solutions.

In keeping with the other owners threads, please refrain from price discussions, other than to say there is a sale on somewhere on these cards. Hopefully this thread will not be about where to buy, etc.

I currently have the Sapphire HD 2400 Pro, which I picked up in downtown Toronto @ Canada Computers. I did some quick tests during the weekend, and saw some very promising, but not perfect results.

In my setup, I'm currently running XP/MCE2005, and I'm outputting to a Westinghouse TX-47, via a DVI->HDMI cable. After solving my first problem (underscan @ 1920x1080), while trying some quick tests in WMP10, I would occasionally see some macroblocking and decompression artifacts, usually just before a large scene change, so I think it might be disk I/O issues.

p.

I also have a Sapphire 2400Pro and the results are pretty bad with PowerDVD 7.3 build 2911.

I have tried the card with XP and Vista. On both systems, I cannot play HD DVDs and BD's with Hardware Acceleration enabled. I get macro-blocking, screen corruption, green flashes, blank screens. I can run without hardware acceleration.
I got it to work for one resolution: 1920x1200 on my XP systems but it would not work at 1920x1080.

I can get it to run without hardware acceleration. Also, I had to uncheck the application controlled in the video setting to get consistent black levels.

It does look great without HW/Accel. Also, I have submitted support requests to PowerDVD and ATI.

- Rich

Its the CCC drivers, they are completely random when it comes to resolutions/refrash rates.

I also tried the Sapphire 2400Pro, but I'm sending it back. Unlike RichB's experience, PowerDVD 7.3 2911 worked fine, for the most part, both with and without accelleration. Once it chrashed for no reason, and once it gave me some funny message about not communicating with the display (HDCP, I suppose). Otherwise it worked fine; I even had a feeling it had less banding (I run a 7900GS to a 1366 x 768 plasma), but that would require more testing with color profiles, and I've already pulled the board out.

It's MCE and normal operation that I'm sending it back for: Every time I try to play a digital TV channel, or a digital recording, MCE 2005 crashes. So does Media Player on those recordings. I get sparklies when I play photos in MCE (over 50' DVI cable) -- I had an old Radeon 9250 board that did the same -- I guess the DVI transcievers are substandard. I pulled the card from the HTPC and put it in my desktop, and it had the same behavior with those digital recordings, but no sparklies. What's more, once in a while the screen blanks and after a few seconds I get one of those VPU recover messages -- something like the board doen't resopond to driver commands.

The issue with digital channels is probably software related, and I understand that I may have received a bad unit, and another one might work fine, but I've had some bad experiences with other Sapphire boards, and I'll wait until something else shows up, and put up with banding in HD-DVD some more.

Yup, I'm getting the driverstoppedresponding error messages in Vista, several times a day. Had the same thing with the 8500gt a bit, but it stopped after a few driver updates. Possibly it might be a PCIE voltage issue too.

A 50' dvi cable is an absolute monster though, that's well outside the standard. I'm severely unimpressed with the card, but I don't really think you can blame it for that one :-)

Its the CCC drivers, they are completely random when it comes to resolutions/refrash rates.

CCC drivers? I am not following you.

I also submitted a tech support request to Sapphire for good measure.

- Rich

CCC drivers? I am not following you.

- Rich

he's referring to the 'Catalyst Control Center', the ATI driver's and app.

p.

Edit: updated. Probably worth getting the Vista hotfix mentioned further down in thread too. As of today (10/july), the only remaining problem in Vista is forced tv>pc colour expansion with videos that are >719 vertical lines. Anything lower is fine.


These are for Vista problems, but some work for XP also. The difference is that in XP they're dwords, and go into the root (0000) directory rather than umd/dxva. For either OS, if you uninstall the driver it deletes all these keys, and the reinstall will set them back to default.


1) For the 2400 only, mpeg2 HD hardware acceleration doesn't work, and neither does European 25/50fps 1080i50. Set these strings to zero:

HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_NOHDDECODE (add if it isn't there)
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080MPEG2
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080VC1


The SORTOVERRIDE ones mentioned elsewhere are probably worth keeping - ATI have them in the 2400 installation but not the 2600, so there must be a performance reason. It's not a problem either, since mpeg2 acceleration works with them there as long as NOHDDECODE is at zero. However, it's possible 60fps 720p material might be unaccelerated as a result of the fpscap one, haven't checked.


2) Horrible forced denoising and sharpening, seemingly for XP/Vista and pretty much all Radeons. Add these keys to umd/dxva:

TrDenoise 0
DXVA_DetailEnhance 0

(note: not sure detailenhance makes any difference as of the latest hotfix drivers, there seems to be another key handling it).


3) WMV acceleration broken. Search for DXVA_WMV_NA, change to 0. Now a new option to allow acceleraiton appears under the control centre's video settings (maybe needs a reboot).

Diamond now has the 2600 series on there website, but am confused. What is the differences between the 4 different models.

http://www.diamondmm.com/HD2600XT.php

Diamond now has the 2600 series on there website, but am confused. What is the differences between the 4 different models.

http://www.diamondmm.com/HD2600XT.php
The difference is in the type of memory used and the amount. Generally speaking, later revisions of the GDDR perform better. But for these cards in HTPC use, there's little practical difference. You'd see a greater difference in high end gaming cards requiring high speeds and bandwidth.

Since the 2400 (xt and pro) is crippled in video performance in their drivers a bit but the 2600 isn't, ATI themselves seem to be thinking the 2600 is more powerful.

However, from my tests this won't be needed under most circumstances, since the 2400pro's gpu copes with >50mbit fairly easily in any format, and 1080i maybe up to around 25mbit (you can see GPU usage in rivatuner). I still need to test different forms of deinterlacing though, and maybe memory bandwidth issues will bite - I've only tested up to around 45mbit 1080p, and 18mbit 1080i, both in h264 (the latter eats a lot more btw, up around 60%).

However, if you use one of those fancy 2500*1600 monitors that certainly would max out the gpu pretty fast, as upscaling really hurts.

By the way, there's a new beta vista driver on the ATI site. Still has the colour expansion problem, but now it only affects HD, and SD is fine (with 7.6 it affects hardware accelerated vmr9 modes, and all EVR modes).

By the way, there's a new beta vista driver on the ATI site. Still has the colour expansion problem, but now it only affects HD, and SD is fine (with 7.6 it affects hardware accelerated vmr9 modes, and all EVR modes).

Is this driver available to the general public? If so where on ATI's website is it?

Thanks,
btl.

However, if you use one of those fancy 2500*1600 monitors that certainly would max out the gpu pretty fast, as upscaling really hurts.

Strangely enough, I was able to run HW accel for VC1 and AVC with PowerDVD on my XP system at 1920x1200 but not at 1920x1080. This is counter intuitive. I wonder what effect scaling is having on this. It is counter intuitive.

- Rich

I had another chance to test out the card yesterday. I did a full reinstall of MCE2005/SP2 (due to earlier hw/bsod issues) and even took a chance and did the OS with the HD2400 installed. Installed MB drivers, then Sapphire driver disk, no probs. I haven't done any registry tweaks yet.

System:
C2D 2x1.86ghz, Asus P5B-VM, 2GB dual channel RAM, SATA drives, HD 2400 Pro.

Installed Haali media splitter, then PowerDVD. I have this all connected to my 47" LCD via a dvi to hdmi cable, I haven't tested the ati hdmi 'audio' dongle yet, but I did see the driver for it install, and I think I saw the option to redirect sound through it in PowerDVD. When I looked to see if acceleration was on, the option was greyed out/unavailable.

Tested a few clips I have:

The Prestige (blu ray / 1080p/AVC MPEG-4) - 0% cpu usage(!), perfect quality

TombRaider (blu ray / 1080p/MPEG-2) - 50% cpu, ok but not great quality (7/10), artifacts, weird scanlines

King Arthur (h.264 / 50hz / .ts) - 0% cpu, great quality, a bit soft.
(seems like S*yHD stuff plays very well)

More tests tonight, including some of the registry tweaks here and in the other 2400 thread, and hopefully I can test the ati hdmi sound dongle. Thanks to arfster and others for registry tweaks!

p.

Strangely enough, I was able to run HW accel for VC1 and AVC with PowerDVD on my XP system at 1920x1200 but not at 1920x1080. This is counter intuitive. I wonder what effect scaling is having on this. It is counter intuitive.


It's pretty linear to the output resolution, not so much the act of scaling itself. Accelerating 1920*1200 wouldn't be a problem unless it was interlaced, and even then I think you'd still be OK. From memory, 1080i source material output at 1080p results in max 65% GPU in rivatuner - when it hits 100% you immediately get framedrop/jitter.

I have the HD 2900XT myself, but since it doesn't have UMD, I have hardware acceleration turned off, and let the CPU do everything (E6600 overclocked). Works fine for me.

Latest testing update: with the new Vista betas. After applying all registry updates, everything is accelerated. Colour expansion no longer happens on SD, but does as soon as vertical resolution hits 720 lines, regardless of format, renderer or DXVA on/off.

It's exactly 720 too, at 718 lines it doesn't expand - you can do this in playback with ffdshow to demonstrate. Thus, a very silly bug, and surely an easy one to fix from ATI's side. Possibly they're using different internal colour spaces with HD resolutions (performance reasons?).

Getting there.....

Latest testing update: with the new Vista betas. After applying all registry updates, everything is accelerated. Colour expansion no longer happens on SD, but does as soon as vertical resolution hits 720 lines, regardless of format, renderer or DXVA on/off.

It's exactly 720 too, at 718 lines it doesn't expand - you can do this in playback with ffdshow to demonstrate. Thus, a very silly bug, and surely an easy one to fix from ATI's side. Possibly they're using different internal colour spaces with HD resolutions (performance reasons?).

Getting there.....

I ran RivaTuner while playing PowerDVD AVC with HW Accel and the GPU is at 30% while I get green flashed, pauses and macro-blocking.

I submitted more information to ATI. Can you PM me with a place to download the Vista Beta drivers?

- Rich

me too! Beta drivers please!

Freaking stupid driver installation package. Some fixes for these problems:

1) For the 2400 only, mpeg2 HD hardware acceleration completely broken, and any format 1080 25/50hz acceleration broken. Delete these keys from your registry:

HKR, "UMD\DXVA",SORTOverrideFPSCaps, %REG_SZ%, "30"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",SORTOverrideVidSizeCaps, %REG_SZ%, "1024000"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080MPEG2, %REG_SZ%, "1"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264, %REG_SZ%, "1"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080VC1, %REG_SZ%, "1"

The latter three are completely pointless, since the card can easily cope with any 1080 stuff you throw at it. The first might have a point in telling the card not to try the very toughest material, but you can always put them back later. However, note that if you deinterace high bitrate stuff to a 1080p output, and use VMR9 in Vista, the card maxxes out and will drop frames like crazy. Switch to EVR (PDVD/WMP) or use a lower output res and it'll be fine.


2) Horrible forced denoising and sharpening. Add these keys to the same section, under umd/dxva:

TrDenoise 0
DXVA_DetailEnhance 0

In Vista these are strings, in XP they're dwords.


3) WMV acceleration broken. Search for DXVA_WMV_NA, change to 0. Now a new option to allow acceleraiton appears under the control centre's video settings (maybe needs a reboot).

Thanks for your work on this issue. I have tried deleting the keys to get mpeg 2 HD hardware acceleration to work in XP but no joy.
Has anyone else got this to work in XP?

Vista beta drivers:

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/hotfix/hotfix_vista32_8-39-5-070625a-49540.exe


By the way, if anyone's not getting mpeg2 acceleration even after the registry changes above, put this in umd/dxva:

DXVA_NOHDDECODE 0

In Vista it's a string, XP I dunno, might be a dword. Setting it to 1 disables mpeg2 dxva instantly for me, back to 0 and it works. For some strange reason the drivers default to 1 if the key isn't there (which it isn't normally).

Since this defaults to 1, so might some of the other dxva-disabling stuff mentioned in the previous reghack post. Rather than deleting the 3 dxva-no24fps keys, it may be better to just set them to 0.

Vista beta drivers:

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/hotfix/hotfix_vista32_8-39-5-070625a-49540.exe


By the way, if anyone's not getting mpeg2 acceleration even after the registry changes above, put this in umd/dxva:

DXVA_NOHDDECODE 0

In Vista it's a string, XP I dunno, might be a dword. Setting it to 1 disables mpeg2 dxva instantly for me, back to 0 and it works. For some strange reason the drivers default to 1 if the key isn't there (which it isn't normally).

I guess you have to have somekind of cookie. I get unauthorized access.

- Rich

... Delete these keys from your registry:

HKR, "UMD\DXVA",SORTOverrideFPSCaps, %REG_SZ%, "30"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",SORTOverrideVidSizeCaps, %REG_SZ%, "1024000"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080MPEG2, %REG_SZ%, "1"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264, %REG_SZ%, "1"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080VC1, %REG_SZ%, "1"


Is it possible to set the last 3 to '0' instead of deleting?

EDIT: NM, just saw your other message about setting it to '0'

p.

I guess you have to have somekind of cookie. I get unauthorized access.


Oops:

http://support.ati.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=28254

Oops:

http://support.ati.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=28254

It does not look like they are going to let us in. Here is what I get:
Your support portal session has expired due to inactivity and the requested action has not been completed. If you entered data in the previous screen and would like to save it, please follow these steps...

- Rich

Hehe, jeez. Try from further up the tree:

http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894

click radeon support PC on the left, find the 2400, look for the one called:

"737-28254: Radeon HD 2000 series: Slow performance in main menu in the game Lost Planet"


There's also one for XP users I see, seems to be the same generation as the above fix (4954x). Go to the 2400, look for the other lost planet related one.

arfster, any word on a beta XP driver?

I've got nothing but problems now - I can't get h/w accel to work for VMR9 in XP anymore. And the funny thing is that it was working on Sunday. Then BAM! It doesn't work anymore and I get flashing green screen (and sometimes a BSOD) now when using Zoomplayer, MPC, or KMPlayer. :(

Hehe, jeez. Try from further up the tree:

http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894

click radeon support PC on the left, find the 2400, look for the one called:

"737-28254: Radeon HD 2000 series: Slow performance in main menu in the game Lost Planet"

Thanks, I got it. I will try it later tonight.

- Rich

TrDenoise 0
DXVA_DetailEnhance 0


3) WMV acceleration broken. Search for DXVA_WMV_NA, change to 0. Now a new option to allow acceleraiton appears under the control centre's video settings (maybe needs a reboot).

Hi

Think ..Should be : TRDenoise (dword 0)

R

new XP Betas add some interesting things :
deinterlacing slider
underscan-overscan slider
improved PQ

best
m

Thank you for that! the DXVA_NOHDDECODE explains my weird results with acceleration and with it on 0 it works perfectly in both XP and vista. It is a dword and takes a reboot to stick in XP. My first install had the key set from ATT so everything worked as it should but I had problems with every reinstall after that and finally found out why :lol: I figured everyone was using the betas so I never mentioned it, haven't even tried 7.6 release ones on the 2400 yet :lol:

Thank you for that! the DXVA_NOHDDECODE explains my weird results with acceleration and with it on 0 it works perfectly in both XP and vista. It is a dword and takes a reboot to stick in XP. My first install had the key set from ATT so everything worked as it should but I had problems with every reinstall after that and finally found out why :lol: I figured everyone was using the betas so I never mentioned it, haven't even tried 7.6 release ones on the 2400 yet :lol:

Cheers, will update post 8 with the fact it's a dword. In Vista it's a string, but none of the options need a reboot.

It's funny how I spent a whole dang week trying to fix what 1 little reg setting fixes :D Cyberlink also works for me now in MCE and vista with that reg entry, it always just crashed immediately using anything but the crappy SAC homenetwork filter.

Yeah, pretty frustrating that all that power is just sitting there unused. You can maybe understand why they would limit it, so it didn't attempt hardware mode on overly hard material and end up a judderfest. However, they definitely set the bar way, way too low.

Still need to figure out the problem with levels expansion though. All I can find is that it happens automatically when the video is >718 lines vertical (ie HD material), regardless of decoder/format/dxva/etc. If anyone else here has the same issue, and surely it's all Vista installs, then please send support tickets to ATI so it gets fixed faster (support.ati.com).

hey guys,

im new to this board but ive been reading a lot on the ati hd series. i've read through this thread and the other long thread and did not read that anyone got the audio to work.

has anyone succesfully got the hdmi audio to work yet?

thx!

hey guys,

im new to this board but ive been reading a lot on the ati hd series. i've read through this thread and the other long thread and did not read that anyone got the audio to work.

has anyone succesfully got the hdmi audio to work yet?

thx!

You need the dongle I'm afraid, $7 US on the ATI shop website.

http://shop.ati.com/product.asp?sku=3526142

coupon code atill5off gets you 5% off that too and free shipping that costs almost as much as the adapter :D

thx for the link and coupon!

has it been confirmed that it works because i read a few posts saying they couldnt get it to work?

Well ya might have been seeing some of the posts saying a standard DVI-HDMI adapter doesn't work and you need the actual ATI one, my DVI-HDMI cable definately doesn't work for passing audio, I get a popup stating a seperate audio connection will have to be used because of the cable type using it. This is my cable

http://www.buy.com/prod/philips-usa-m62815-hdmi-to-dvi-cable/q/loc/111/202784055.html

I just bought mine today so I wont know how well the adapter works for awhile, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work as advertised.

well hopefully it does because i just want to use the speakers on my tv because its just for my bedroom and i dont need a LOT of sound

any reports on when the next driver release will be?

Well ya might have been seeing some of the posts saying a standard DVI-HDMI adapter doesn't work and you need the actual ATI one, my DVI-HDMI cable definately doesn't work for passing audio, I get a popup stating a seperate audio connection will have to be used because of the cable type using it. This is my cable

http://www.buy.com/prod/philips-usa-m62815-hdmi-to-dvi-cable/q/loc/111/202784055.html

I just bought mine today so I wont know how well the adapter works for awhile, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work as advertised.

That would be pretty cheesy of ATI if you need their adapter. However, HDMI does has a couple of "unused" pins: CEC and the defined NoConnect. ATI could use them to detect that THEIR adapter is being used by tieing them hi or low.

Don't know why they'd bother, but it does sound like they detect something in the dongle or cable...

It could very well just be the cable I'm using, but I don't have any others to test with and other people are reporting the same problem. They definately do detect what kind of adapter you are using though. For $6.80 shipped I just went ahead and bought the ATI adapter, can't find a DVI-HDMI adapter locally for anywhere near that price anyway :D Anyone here have it passing through audio at all with or without the adapter?

Yeah, pretty frustrating that all that power is just sitting there unused. You can maybe understand why they would limit it, so it didn't attempt hardware mode on overly hard material and end up a judderfest. However, they definitely set the bar way, way too low.

Still need to figure out the problem with levels expansion though. All I can find is that it happens automatically when the video is >718 lines vertical (ie HD material), regardless of decoder/format/dxva/etc. If anyone else here has the same issue, and surely it's all Vista installs, then please send support tickets to ATI so it gets fixed faster (support.ati.com).

Arfster....did u say you are using Riva Tuner to display your GPU usage etc?

I thought that was a utility for Nvidia cards only? If not, what version are you running and where can I download it from?

HAHAHAHHA @ $680 for 2600PRO (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102103)

Surely a typo.

2.02 works great, grab it here http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=rivatuner

2.02 works great, grab it here http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=rivatuner

Thanks...just playing with it now on VISTA....working great so far.

Craig

I'm getting moderate levels of macroblocking on pans with 1080i mpeg2. Cpu is at 60-70% which is higher than it was with my Nvidia 7300LE and hardware accel on. I tried the registry fixes and it did not affect my mpeg2 playback. What kind of cpu useage should I expect with mpeg2? Is it fully accelerated?

h264 plays back fine with 2-5% cpu! awesome

My setup:
Athlon 3200+
2400pro
Windows MCE
SageTV for player (and WMP)
FSE
VMR9
Cyberlink powerdvd ultra 7.3
720p output to samsung DLP

HD 2400
a 1080 i 20 MBit MPEG2 DVB/s live stream (Astra HD) ... PDVD7 DXVA 7 % CPU
100% GPU
E 6600@3 GHz

Best
M

I am planning on getting the HD2600XT for my new HTPC, but still have some concerns. I am ready to order, but am hestitant to do just yet.

The main concern is the card itself. It is not getting very good reviews from just about everywhere. I will be using it mainly for HD, but will play some games. My other option that I keep looking at is the x1950, but it has some heat problems. Will this card eventually work out it's issues with updated drivers?

Another concern is the audio. I plan on running HDMI to my switcher and then to the Sony HDTV. My audio will be output via my Delta Dio 24/96 to my A/V receiver. Will this work this way?

Is there anybody nuts tried MPG4 hw accelleration :D if it's possibile because
no directshow filter has been released by ati for this purpose. is it correct?

thanks a lot.

ps: is there avaiabile 2400 o 2600 card other than sapphire. because in Italy only this brand is on the run actually.

Is there anybody nuts tried MPG4 hw accelleration :D if it's possibile because
no directshow filter has been released by ati for this purpose. is it correct?

thanks a lot.

ps: is there avaiabile 2400 o 2600 card other than sapphire. because in Italy only this brand is on the run actually.

Newegg in the USofA has started carrying the Powercolor versions.

I am not strong with computers, so I do not understand anything about registry changes and how to do that!

Fact is, the 2400 Pro is working fine with Powerdvd, HDDVD and BD. Image is better then with my old 7600 Nvidia. I still have XP.

But yes, no harware acceleration on Mpeg 2 ts files! And I hope that new drivers will come out soon to fix this problem!!

It is first ATI's job to find an easy solution for that, not for us to ruin our system! We can't be all computer experts! Also, when you have not English as your native language, it is not always easy to changes things yourself!!

Is there anybody nuts tried MPG4 hw accelleration :D if it's possibile because
no directshow filter has been released by ati for this purpose. is it correct?


The decoder that comes with PDVD 7.3 is the only one that works. Nero and WinDVD supposedly can also do h264 acceleration, but only within their own applications.

I'm using Vsita though, not sure about XP. Anyone know if the 7.3 decoder is working in XP directshow?

The decoder that comes with PDVD 7.3 is the only one that works. Nero and WinDVD supposedly can also do h264 acceleration, but only within their own applications

ok for cyberlink h.264. I knew that. but also work for mpg-4 (xvid/divx)?
with Ati's uvd should be avaiable mpg-4 hw accelleration? the question is : how? :(

Well, h264 is mpeg4 :-)

Never heard of xvid acceleration software though - those files are so easy to play I guess nobody bothers to write such a decoder. It's not really ATI's problem though, graphics card manufacturers don't do codecs anymore.

Well, h264 is mpeg4 :-)
Never heard of xvid acceleration software though - those files are so easy to play I guess nobody bothers to write such a decoder. It's not really ATI's problem though, graphics card manufacturers don't do codecs anymore.

Absolutly right :D but ATI declare "Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration" (from Sapphire main site) so I was curious: how can they test MPEG-4/DivX without a directshow filter? In Italian we say: "stanno sparando cazzate" (i do not traslate... :D )

Hi all - completely new here.

I have 2400pro that I have a problem with. I am using the provided component dongle to hook it up to my LCD TV (it does not have DVI or HDMI). I can choose 720p fine, but only at 60hz. I know my TV is capable of handling 50Hz as well because my XBOX360 works fine. The jumper on the card has been set to PAL. Anyone experienced this? Is the card not capable of doing 50Hz through component, or is it just a matter of a driver update?
I am using Vista 32bit.

I'm having all sorts of problems getting the Cyberlink h264 decoder to work in h/w acceleration mode in DirectShow players using VMR9.

Sometimes it works - but most of the time I get flashing multicolored blocks (mostly green blocks). Audio plays and I can seek. But the video is seriously messed up.

Then, after trying different player settings (moving audio filters around, etc.) it will suddenly work and continue to work until I reboot the PC. Ugh. This is VERY frustrating.

Also, I cannot seem to get anything other than 852x480 resolution when I choose Overlay in DirectShow players (Zoomplayer, KMPlayer).

I haven't tried all the registry tweaks yet. Perhaps I should try using Sonic HD Decoders 4.2?

Max: have you tried with graphedit so sound issues aren't a concern? Oh, and are the gpu temps OK?

Have to say I'm not overly surprised that XP h264 playback is dodgy - it is with the cyberlink decoder and 8500/8600 in XP too, and the 2400/2600 seem to replicate the same problems with h264 playback the NVidia cards have. You could maybe try today's PDVD patch and the beta xp driver - support.ati.com, look under 2400 category for ...

"737-28298: Users may experience slow performance using the menu system in the game Lost Planet."

Thanks arfster - I will try these measures. I think I have one more week to return this POS card (Sapphire HD 2400 Pro passive). :)

Card temps are good ... usually 50C after an hour while at the desktop. Hits 60C if I do a lot of h264 playback tests.

I think is the best to do is enjoy what works, this means bd/hdvd, and that is working fine.

For ts files and other problem, I think they wil be solved.

Thanks arfster - I will try these measures. I think I have one more week to return this POS card (Sapphire HD 2400 Pro passive). :)

Card temps are good ... usually 50C after an hour while at the desktop. Hits 60C if I do a lot of h264 playback tests.

I think that should be fine, assuming the bit being measured is actually the bit that might cause problems overheating.

As to the card itself: once I got over the initial stupid driver issues with the registry changes above, it seems OK. There's still the annoying forced levels expansion for HD material, and the default settings out of the box are garbage (eg forced denoise/sharpening, mpeg2 broken cos of registry typo, no HD acceleration other than for 24fps stuff, all requiring registry changes to fix). However, the raw hardware is really impressive - at least a match for the 8500/8600 I think, and the vector-adaptive deinterlacing is really, really nice (at least as good in SD, and better in h264).

A full test awaits them fixing that levels thing though, because I can only compare SD at present. Maybe I should test DVDs and scaling and so on, hrrrrrrm.

There are two 2600HDs up on newegg now. One 256BM XT and one 512MB. Pro Ordered the 512mb 2600pro for $97. Should be here Friday. Crossing fingers. :) Will be replacing a 7600GT that died on me.

Thanks arfster - I will try these measures. I think I have one more week to return this POS card (Sapphire HD 2400 Pro passive). :)

Card temps are good ... usually 50C after an hour while at the desktop. Hits 60C if I do a lot of h264 playback tests.

I just ordered a 2600Pro from NewEgg since I could not get HW Acceleration to work at all with PowerDVD 7.3. It will be interesting to see what happens. Usually, I get them next day with 3 day shipping. I should know by the end of the week.

- Rich

Is the general concensus that people are getting this card working for standard HD-DVD/BR playback with no problem? What about at 1080p resolutions? I wont be playing games or playing back other file formats, just DVDs/HDDVDs/BR.

Cheapguy: from what I can tell, hddvd/bluray playback are the least troublesome aspect, as the cards are particularly intended for them - the exception being mpeg2, which I can't get any PDVD acceleration with for my Bluray discs even with the reg changes. I'm guessing this is a PDVD problem, since if I decrypt and open the file in media mode it accelerates fine. H264 and VC1 work nicely, with near-zero CPU on a 2ghz Core2Duo (PDVD takes up to 10% for non-graphics elements of the disc though).

The registry changes are needed to get mpeg2 HD acceleration working for WMV acceleration, and for non-24fps HD VC1/h264 material (ie particularly 1080i50 European h264 broadcasts), so if you don't need these, don't worry. All the above is for Vista, I can't speak for XP - some people appear to be having odd problems there.


RichB: probably not a bad idea. From the installation software default settings (same for 2400 and 2600), I get the impression the 2600 has a lot more horsepower for acceleration from the extra memory bandwidth, but the video hardware is otherwise identical. This may be needed in particular for outputting video to 2500*1600 monitors, and maybe for deinterlacing high bitrate stuff - the 2400pro is getting a little close to its max on both counts. However, I'd prefer to stick with the 2400pro's absolutely tiny heat output if possible - there does seem a lot of room for improving the performance, as mpeg2 SD deinterlacing oddly takes more gpu cycles than h264 deinterlacing :-)

1080 resolutions are fine. Only H/w acceleration, give problem on TS Mpeg 2.
H 264 from European broadcast is doing fine without H/W acceleration, but my processor is a 2x4200 + Athlon.

Image is fantastic, now we have to be a bit patient to get more stabilised drivers!

I am not sure that this is a Cyberlink issue though....

Cheapguy: from what I can tell, hddvd/bluray playback are the least troublesome aspect, as the cards are particularly intended for them - the exception being mpeg2, which I can't get any PDVD acceleration with for my Bluray discs even with the reg changes. I'm guessing this is a PDVD problem, since if I decrypt and open the file in media mode it accelerates fine. H264 and VC1 work nicely, with near-zero CPU on a 2ghz Core2Duo (PDVD takes up to 10% for non-graphics elements of the disc though).

The registry changes are needed to get mpeg2 HD acceleration working for WMV acceleration, and for non-24fps HD VC1/h264 material (ie particularly 1080i50 European h264 broadcasts), so if you don't need these, don't worry. All the above is for Vista, I can't speak for XP - some people appear to be having odd problems there.


RichB: probably not a bad idea. From the installation software default settings (same for 2400 and 2600), I get the impression the 2600 has a lot more horsepower for acceleration from the extra memory bandwidth, but the video hardware is otherwise identical. This may be needed in particular for outputting video to 2500*1600 monitors, and maybe for deinterlacing high bitrate stuff - the 2400pro is getting a little close to its max on both counts. However, I'd prefer to stick with the 2400pro's absolutely tiny heat output if possible - there does seem a lot of room for improving the performance, as mpeg2 SD deinterlacing oddly takes more gpu cycles than h264 deinterlacing :-)


Arfster....what combination of DS codec and renderer are you using to get accelerated H.264 playback? What about MPEG2?

I can't get any MPEG2 acceleration using Nvidia Pure Video decoder.....even after the registry changes. Maybe I will try Cyberlink.

Craig

1080 resolutions are fine. Only H/w acceleration, give problem on TS Mpeg 2.
H 264 from European broadcast is doing fine without H/W acceleration, but my processor is a 2x4200 + Athlon.


Yeah, I don't need acceleration either (3ghz core2 duo), but the real benefit of these cards is with interlaced video material - even with high bitrate 1080i h264, they can do excellent vector-adaptive deinterlacing. In software you'll only have crude weave deinterlacing, which to be blunt sucks. Obviously this doesn't matter for film stuff, but it makes the picture a fair bit better with news/sports/anything live.

If people are uncomfortable with registry hacking, I could zip up a version of the Vista driver package with them pre-changed. Would take all of 5 minutes, it's just changing a few values in an installation settings text file.

in vista you shouldn't get acceleration with purevideo codecs with anything using EVR (media center, WMP) but it works fine with full mpeg2 acceleration of everything in MCE2005. accelerated h264 playback with directshow codecs is buggy for both the new ATI and nvidia cards and not even worth messing with right now, but HD-DVD/bluray works fine inside powerdvd. mpeg2 acceleration works fine at all resolutions with the MS, cyberlink and sonic decoders, but some people are having problems with .ts files in this thread. sonic decoder has alot of registry entries if anyone is messing with it on vista, might need to change the disabledxvaonvista entry (not the exact wording i dont think)..

Arfster....what combination of DS codec and renderer are you using to get accelerated H.264 playback? What about MPEG2?


MPEG2: cyberlink with vmr9 or evr. Also tried the nvidia purevideo decoder with vmr9 (can't work with evr cos it's ancient) and it worked, but the cyberlink decoder is much better these days so I stick with it. AFAICS, any codec with dxva1 support should work with VMR9, and more modern ones might work with EVR.

H264: no choice here, it's the cyberlink h264 decoder, and only with EVR (dxva1 h264 decoders don't work in Vista at all, and dxva2 means EVR).


This is all with Vista. In XP VMR9 should work with all, in theory.


Note you must set DXVA_NOHDDECODE to 0 (in vista a string, in xp a dword) or you won't get any mpeg2 HD acceleration at all - with that key absent or set to 1 it simply stops directshow from making a dxva connection with mpeg2 HD.

With default settings h264 HD 24fps video will work, but any other frame rate won't. The DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264 does what it says, basically.

TechReport published their overview of the HD 2400/2600 today. I noticed in their HD HQV page that the HD 2400 scored 0 on the "jaggies" and "HD noise reduction" tests whereas the HD2600s did better.

This page is here:
Techreport HD HQV test (http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2007q3/radeon-hd-2400-2600/index.x?pg=11)

Any idea why the 2400 would do worse than 2600, if this article is to be believed?

Is anyone using the HD2600's with Windows XP?

Any idea why the 2400 would do worse than 2600, if this article is to be believed?

Probably related to our new amigos DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264, dxvanohd_decoder and co, which the driver package doesn't add for the 2600 pro/xt.

Could also be that noise reduction adds so much to the card's workload it skips it with the 2400. Personally I disabled it completely since it looks like crap. Not sure why you'd want noise reduction on HD anyway, even if it worked as intended.


Edit: the hqv disc is apparently in VC1, and thus on default settings the 2400 pro/xt would have no hardware features switched on at all for (30fps) interlaced stuff. I can't say they'd perform the same as the 2600 with them on, but I suspect they probably would (given that it seems capable of deinterlacing high bitrate HD h264 no problem).

TechReport published their overview of the HD 2400/2600 today. I noticed in their HD HQV page that the HD 2400 scored 0 on the "jaggies" and "HD noise reduction" tests whereas the HD2600s did better.

This page is here:
Techreport HD HQV test (http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2007q3/radeon-hd-2400-2600/index.x?pg=11)

Any idea why the 2400 would do worse than 2600, if this article is to be believed?

I should have a 2600Pro in a day or so. My 2400Pro does not work with PowerDVD 7.3 2911 with HW Accel for VC1 or AVC. If the 2600Pro does work, that will help confirm that there are differences. Most vendors have a cryptic 1080P support indicated for the 2600 but not for the 2400 and that may mean something real ;)

- Rich

I'd put money on it being the 24fps limit or SORT entries messing with it, they used the same drivers for both cards and those 5 registry settings are the only difference between the 2 :D

I should have a 2600Pro in a day or so. My 2400Pro does not work with PowerDVD 7.2 with HW Accel for VC1 or AVC. If the 2600Pro does work, that will help confirm that there are differences. Most vendors have a cryptic 1080P support indicated for the 2600 but not for the 2400 and that may mean something real

It shouldn't work, they didn't add UMD support till the 7.3.2911 evr patch as far as I know :(

I'd put money on it being the 24fps limit or SORT entries messing with it, they used the same drivers for both cards and those 5 registry settings are the only difference between the 2 :D



It shouldn't work, they didn't add UMD support till the 7.3.2911 evr patch as far as I know :(

OOPS. Typo. I am runing PowerDVD 7.3 2911. I will edit my previous post.

- Rich

that's really strange though, it's working fine here in both XP and vista ultimate. I tested all vc1 mpeg2 and h264 and all had no problems :( are you in XP/MCE2005 by any chance? the reg edit for XP goes in the /0000/ directory and not in the UMD/DXVA like vista if so, might have something to do with it.

Oops, hadn't realised XP was a different section. Sarvatt, maybe you should write the XP equivalent of my post earlier (no8)? Just a quick where-the-keys-go thing.

Newbie here......

installed card with CCC 7.6

but have 2" black bar all around

this is underscan i believe, where are the setting to adjust this?

I have this hooked up to a sony 1080p lcd

Thanks all.

I'm still not having any luck with the mpeg2. I still get macroblocking issues. I tried the DXVA_NOHDDECODE = 0 hack, then the denoise and sharpening hacks. None of these helped me. GPU sits at 35%, my 3200+ at 70-90% (why is CPU so high! even my old 7300LE without hardware accel on was less than this) I am getting macroblocking that bugs the hell out of me. I thought I would be fine becasue I only have a 720p display but...

I've tried every combination of decoders I have and I still get garbage. I've tried Dwords and strings. Still nothing. Starting to get frustrated. Love the h264 and VC-1, and it works great, but I don't have my HD-DVD player hooked to the computer yet so who cares! I just want smooth HD mpeg2 with correct 3:2 pulldown and sweet adaptive deinterlacing. Is that too much to ask from a $60 video card? Should I have ordered the 2600pro and modded it for passive? A score of 100 is awesome on the HD HQV test because every other test I have seen show a score of 0 for HD material on every card tested. I know it does not matter much arfster, but this is all we have for comparision right now.

Running
XP
720p
cyberlink 7.3
MPC, WMP, SageTV
VMR9
FSE
3200+ W/1GB ram
2400pro
7.6 and the beta drivers mentioned in this thread

EDIT: Yes! I finally got it! Apparently there are lots of DXVA_NOHDDECODE entries in the registry and I was modifying only one of them. You have to put DVXA_NOHDDECODE in every place you see the DXVA_ONLY24FPS1080PH264 entries. Now my GPU is running at 85-95% though. Ouch. I'll try to over clock a bit

not really any need to, only thing is all the keys go in the main /0000/ or /0001/ folder and are d-words. I put it in both incase its needed but I dont think it uses any but /0000/

Thank you for that! the DXVA_NOHDDECODE explains my weird results with acceleration and with it on 0 it works perfectly in both XP and vista. It is a dword and takes a reboot to stick in XP. My first install had the key set from ATT so everything worked as it should but I had problems with every reinstall after that and finally found out why :lol: I figured everyone was using the betas so I never mentioned it, haven't even tried 7.6 release ones on the 2400 yet :lol:

Where in the registry are you guys setting this?

not really any need to, only thing is all the keys go in the main /0000/ or /0001/ folder and are d-words. I put it in both incase its needed but I dont think it uses any but /0000/

I had 4 device folders in each folder 0000 and 0001 and I changed it in each. This is the first time I have edited registry settings except in a few rare instances where it was well documented. All these changes are probably not needed and maybe an expert can step in here.

So, I've had some time to play with my 2400pro now.

mpeg2 1080i accelerated video looks fantastic. Currently AFAIK, the HD2400 and HD2600 series are the only cards capable of adaptive deinterlacing and 3:2 pulldown for HD material. Nvidia apparently is trying, but are not quite there. I still get some slow down once in awhile if I am skipping through the video, but my macro blocking issues are gone. At stock speeds 525/400 there was still some macro blocking on pans, but at a stable 580/500 I have no more problems so far with blocking or skipping on American broadcast HD.

DVDs and standard 480i TV are also much improved PQ over my old 7300LE that could not do IVTC or proper 3:2 pulldown. That temporary 7300LE lasted far too long in my system but I am glad I waited for the ATI cards.

h264 and VC-1 playback flawlessly on my 3200+. MKVs are working just fine. All this is in XP btw.

At this time, I would not recomend the 2400pro unless you really want a cool, passive card and like to fool around with this stuff. (I do) The 2600pro would be a much better choice at this time. The extra horsepower should allow it to handle any content you throw at it. I bet in the coming weeks and months that many passive 2600pros will turn up, and I imagine it would be easy to modify one for passive operation. Until driver issues can be fixed, this is my recomendation. Despite the fact that I got mine working, the GPU useage is high, now at ~80% on HD mpeg2 and I needed an overclock to fix my blocking problems.

If you do buy one of these cards, you will not be dissappointed with the PQ :cool: Unless you run into a few color issues that I am sure will be worked out quickly. Some people pay thousands of $$$ for scalers and deinterlacers that can barely match this $60 video card. I bet for $350 you could put together a nice low end HTPC with this card that could smoke most people's scalers and high end HTPCs. This card allows you once again, like in the time of simple analog TV, to build a HTPC with your spare parts. You have to love that. Now where is that AGP version!

good post ..same here
best value ever for 50 €uros (with the registry changes applied)
the 2400 passive OClocking is not so easy as it looks , see my prior posts about this issue .. temps aren`t much higher , but occasional black screens and VPU recover may appear .. (> 65 degrees C is way to high for the 2400 HD passive)
so far my stable OC is 580/ 480 with an in-fan 20cm in front of the card.
(temp. max HD 48 C)
1080 i MPEG2 DXVA >20 MBit is no problem then.
People who want to keep the card with a higher OC may try to ugrade to
a Coollaboratory Liquid pro GPU pad (5€) . Lowers temps by 5 degrees C.
Sapphire (as always) uses rather cheap and way to much thermalpaste on the HD 2400.

best
m

I got xp. My English is not bad, but I don't understand how to edit the register, even how to get there, and what i have to do exactly.

Not a neird, but far from an expert, I am afraid....

what is the chance that ATI will include all these registry edits in the next driver update?

oh and i just noticed 2400xt is on newegg now! is the only difference between XT and Pro the HDMI dongle?

as far as the processor for h264 and vc1 go... they are the same for the 2400 and 2600 series right? its just the gaming graphics that will differ?

If there is a fix for the HD levels expansion problem, I’ll get a 2600XT with DDR4 to test.

.....If people are uncomfortable with registry hacking, I could zip up a version of the Vista driver package with them pre-changed. Would take all of 5 minutes, it's just changing a few values in an installation settings text file.
Arf would you please be so kind and do this for us?

I really dont know how to move about the registry in Vista yet. Thanks alot.

XP welcome too!!! :)

At this time, I would not recomend the 2400pro unless you really want a cool, passive card and like to fool around with this stuff. (I do) The 2600pro would be a much better choice at this time. The extra horsepower should allow it to handle any content you throw at it. I bet in the coming weeks and months that many passive 2600pros will turn up

Gigabyte 2600 Pro and XT have passive cool. 512MB, GDDR2.
Pro cost in Italy 95€ tax included. 120€ for XT model with 256 MB gddr3.

what is the chance that ATI will include all these registry edits in the next driver update?

oh and i just noticed 2400xt is on newegg now! is the only difference between XT and Pro the HDMI dongle?

as far as the processor for h264 and vc1 go... they are the same for the 2400 and 2600 series right? its just the gaming graphics that will differ?


2400pro>xt means faster memory. Not sure how much that affects video performance.

Between the 2400 and 2600 there is definitely something considerable in performance terms (as they use the same driver package yet some things are disabled for the 2400, suggesting ATI think the 2400 is a but weaker). All progressive stuff is easily coped with, but deinterlacing 1080i is nasty - that eats 60-80% of the card's GPU, although a lot less if you output at 720p or so. If you were to add colour/detail enhancement, noise reduction etc, it'd be too much. Similarly, use a 2500*1600 display and it couldn't cope.

MPEG2: cyberlink with vmr9 or evr. Also tried the nvidia purevideo decoder with vmr9 (can't work with evr cos it's ancient) and it worked, but the cyberlink decoder is much better these days so I stick with it. AFAICS, any codec with dxva1 support should work with VMR9, and more modern ones might work with EVR.

H264: no choice here, it's the cyberlink h264 decoder, and only with EVR (dxva1 h264 decoders don't work in Vista at all, and dxva2 means EVR).


This is all with Vista. In XP VMR9 should work with all, in theory.


Note you must set DXVA_NOHDDECODE to 0 (in vista a string, in xp a dword) or you won't get any mpeg2 HD acceleration at all - with that key absent or set to 1 it simply stops directshow from making a dxva connection with mpeg2 HD.

With default settings h264 HD 24fps video will work, but any other frame rate won't. The DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264 does what it says, basically.

My fault.....I misspelled the DXVA_NOHDDECODE key. MPEG2 acceleration is now working with the Nvidia Pure Video decoder (VMR9)....but I will never use that filter combination :) . I use FFDShow for most of my DVB MPEG2 stuff and that precludes any DXVA.

H.264 acceleration is working well with Cyberlink.

Thanks for the registry tips!

Craig

I bought the 2400Pro.
It won't play some of my BluRay movies and crashes quite often on others.
It's going back today. I'll be getting a 2600XT today, hope it's better.

2400pro>xt means faster memory. Not sure how much that affects video performance.

Between the 2400 and 2600 there is definitely something considerable in performance terms (as they use the same driver package yet some things are disabled for the 2400, suggesting ATI think the 2400 is a but weaker). All progressive stuff is easily coped with, but deinterlacing 1080i is nasty - that eats 60-80% of the card's GPU, although a lot less if you output at 720p or so. If you were to add colour/detail enhancement, noise reduction etc, it'd be too much. Similarly, use a 2500*1600 display and it couldn't cope.

Wouldn't the 700 MHz memory clock (2400PRO) vs the 525 MHz (2400XT) imply that certain sections of the XT (besides the external memory interface) are running faster also? For example, the TechReport article list core clock as 700 MHz for the 2400XT. I remember that nvidia claimed that their faster running cores had more PureVideo processing poop than the slower running ones...

The 2400XT looks like a good deal also: besides the possibly-special-to-ATI HDMI dongle you get a much more impressive-looking heatsink.

I also notice Newegg continues it's sloppy product descriptions. Newegg lists 2 DVI, whereas the picture shows the card is populated with only one DVI, though the card has an option for a second DVI connector. I guess they wanted to save a $1 or whatever the connector cost diffrential is.

Two DVI with one HDMI dongle also brings up the question of can you have two seperate audio streams, one for each possible HDMI port...probably not. The top of the line Sapphire 2600 that Newegg carries includes two DVI-VGA dongles but only one DVI-HDMI dongle.


It would be interesting for somebody to try the XT vs PRO in the same system. I assume RivaTuner could tell you something useful about GPU usage...

I will be ordering one of these shortly. I will probably get the 2600XT, but may wait until everything settles down to make sure this is what I want.

Most of the test/reviews have been on the 2400 series. How many has the 2600 series cards and how are they holding up?

For Vista 2400 owners uncomfortable with doing registry changes themselves:

http://rapidshare.com/files/42515567/vista_2400_drivers_tweaked.zip.html

Basically the latest vista hotfix drivers from the ati site, with settings changed for the 2400 (pro and xt) so mpeg2 HD works, European 1080i50 h264 works, and the option to turn on WMV acceleration appears in the control panel. None of the changes in it are permanent - any future ATI driver install will wipe and overwrite the whole section they exist in.

For those who care, only these lines were changed:

HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_NOHDDECODE, %REG_SZ%, "0" (line added , fixes mpeg2)
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264, %REG_SZ%, "0" (default 1, fixes EU 1080i50)
HKR,, DXVA_WMV_NA, %REG_SZ%, "0" (default 1, shows WMV acceleration tickbox)

These were added:

HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_DetailEnhance, %REG_SZ%, "0"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_TRDenoise, %REG_SZ%, "0"

These disable the forced sharpening/denoising that mess up deinterlacing. Not sure the detail one is needed now though, as there appear to be others doing its job. Can't hurt to have it there though.

Tum te tum:

http://rapidshare.com/files/42515567/vista_2400_drivers_tweaked.zip.html

Basically the latest vista hotfix drivers from the ati site, with settings changed for the 2400 (pro and xt) so mpeg2 HD works, European 1080i50 h264 works, and the option to turn on WMV acceleration appears in the control panel.

For those who care, only these lines were changed:

HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_NOHDDECODE, %REG_SZ%, "0" (line added , fixes mpeg2)
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264, %REG_SZ%, "0" (default 1, fixes EU 1080i50)
HKR,, DXVA_WMV_NA, %REG_SZ%, "0" (default 1, shows WMV acceleration tickbox)

These were added:

HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_DetailEnhance, %REG_SZ%, "0"
HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_TRDenoise, %REG_SZ%, "0"

These disable the forced sharpening/denoising that mess up deinterlacing. Not sure the detail one is needed now though, as there appear to be others doing its job. Can't hurt to have it there though.

Thanks! But as I am running through XP, I have to find another sollution.....

Is it difficult to get in the registry? Is there a Geek manual?

I will be ordering one of these shortly. I will probably get the 2600XT, but may wait until everything settles down to make sure this is what I want.

Most of the test/reviews have been on the 2400 series. How many has the 2600 series cards and how are they holding up?

I'm surprised that there are ten 2600XXX owners (and 36 2400XX owners) in the poll.
Only one of the 2400XX owners has the XT. I'd be interested in buying a 2400XT in addition to the 2400Pro I already have, IF the 2400XT has more video processing poop.

I hope AMD/ATI straighten out their act in reporting the video processing capabilities of these new cards. Maybe that formerly-under-NDA PDF has some truth in it...

good post ..same here
best value ever for 50 €uros (with the registry changes applied)
the 2400 passive OClocking is not so easy as it looks , see my prior posts about this issue .. temps aren`t much higher , but occasional black screens and VPU recover may appear .. (> 65 degrees C is way to high for the 2400 HD passive)
so far my stable OC is 580/ 480 with an in-fan 20cm in front of the card.
(temp. max HD 48 C)
1080 i MPEG2 DXVA >20 MBit is no problem then.
People who want to keep the card with a higher OC may try to ugrade to
a Coollaboratory Liquid pro GPU pad (5€) . Lowers temps by 5 degrees C.
Sapphire (as always) uses rather cheap and way to much thermalpaste on the HD 2400.

best
m

My temps hit 68C during the ATI auto overclocking. Compared to my 7300LE with the same cooling, bigger heatsink, this is low. My 7300LE would idle at 60C and top out at 90C. It had a throttle temp of 130 so it never gave probelms. I don't use any active cooling on the card but I designed the airflow in the case to pass over the graphics card its the way into the case. I use a NSK2400 with two Yate Loon 120mm fans exhausting the air. One YL is ducted to exhaust a passive Aerocool 101 tower heatsink, and the other exhausts the case. I taped up some holes, partially covered some others, and left the PCI slot cover out in front of the graphics card. Then I put some cardboard on the top of the graphics card that goes from the graphics card to the top of the case so the incoming air does not shortcut over the top of the card and has to move all the way around the graphics card heatsink before it can mix with the rest of the case air. These YL fans spin at very low rpm, maybe 500 and controlled by the motherboard so they really don't move much air and never ramp up. The computer is very very very quiet.

The automatic ATI overclock set the card at 600/575 but it was not stable. I got lots of artifacts and shutdowns. It seems like the 600mhz on the core was pretty stable but the memory could not handle the 575 and I continued to get artifacts all the way down to 520. I set it at 580/500 just to be safe. I would like to play around with it tonight and find out what is the limiting factor for this card. What caused my macroblocking? Was the core overloaded or was the memory bandwidth too small. Right now I think the memory is the culprit and I have a feeling the 2400XT with it's huge increase in memory bandwidth will fare much better than the pro. Since the 2400XT is on the same core as the 2400pro, it should be have similar heat output. It probably just has a little more voltage on the chip than the pro allowing the higher clock. The 2400 pro is just too close to it's limit with mpeg2 to make me comfortable. I'm hoping it is the memory speed because that would be easier to put a passive 2400xt in my case than switching to the 2600pro which might require some more serious airflow modifications to stay passive.

I am taking back my 2400Pro card today. Even with all the registry tweaks (using Windows XP), I get random purple/green lines appear in PowerDVD.

I can sometimes get h/w accel working in other players like Zoomplayer, KMPlayer, MPC, etc. But after a reboot and playing back the same videos I get massive video corruption and flashing green screens.

I've already rebuilt the OS 3 times trying to get consistently stable playback, but no go. This card and the drivers are not even close to being ready for video playback. [EDIT: I also tried the hotfix drivers, and the older 7.5 drivers)

Save your money and your time and wait 6 months is my advice.

In the meantime, I will stay with my NVIDIA 7900GT - it is always stable, the PQ is just as good as the 2400 Pro (except for Overlay), and CPU usage is just passable with VMR9 and DirectVobSub.

I got an ATI HD 2600 HT and I'm pleased with the performance especially on blu-ray and hd-dvd playback. Also DVD playback looks very good.

The video playback is smooth and much better than my previous NVidia 8600 GTS

I got an ATI HD 2600 HT and I'm pleased with the performance especially on blu-ray and hd-dvd playback. Also DVD playback looks very good.

The video playback is smooth and much better than my previous NVidia 8600 GTS

How noticeable is the fan? I am debating between this one and the Gigabyte fanless model.

I'm surprised that there are ten 2600XXX owners (and 36 2400XX owners) in the poll.
Only one of the 2400XX owners has the XT. I'd be interested in buying a 2400XT in addition to the 2400Pro I already have, IF the 2400XT has more video processing poop.

I hope AMD/ATI straighten out their act in reporting the video processing capabilities of these new cards. Maybe that formerly-under-NDA PDF has some truth in it...

Why not go for the 2600?
They are ranging from $97 for the Pro to $107 for the GT on NewEgg.

- Rich

Why not go for the 2600?
They are ranging from $97 for the Pro to $107 for the GT on NewEgg.

- Rich

I'm thrifty!
AND the 2600 cards are not passively cooled. I've never had a fan-cooled graphics card: I'm not a gamer.

I can't hear the fan on the Sapphire 2600 XT.... it's good for playback and for a silent PC.

Also concerning the video quality I found a review:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2007q3/radeon-hd-2400-2600/index.x?pg=11

Newbie here......

installed card with CCC 7.6

but have 2" black bar all around

this is underscan i believe, where are the setting to adjust this?

I have this hooked up to a sony 1080p lcd

Thanks all.

This is what fixed it for me:
(full: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=729041)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've put together a simple executable to set the registry settings.
For all display configurations, it adds "DALR6 DFP", "DALR6 CRT"
and "DALCV" underscan for 1920x1080 and 1280x720. It might
require a C runtime DLL, let me know if you try running it and it
complains about a missing library. Also, I only have Windows XP
to test it here, so I have no idea right now where the correct
registry keys are under Vista (i.e., this may or may not work,
but probably won't for Vista). Good luck!

http://209.218.200.18/ht/FixMyUnderscan.exe

Permission is granted to freely copy or distribute this application
with no restriction, as long as credit is given to the original author,
"PapaSloth on AVS Forum".
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I ran it, started CCC as indicated, exited CCC without making any changes, rebooted, and had full screen, no black borders.


p.

For Vista 2400 owners uncomfortable with doing registry changes themselves:

http://rapidshare.com/files/42515567/vista_2400_drivers_tweaked.zip.html

European 1080i50 h264 works.

Hi arfster or anyone else. Do you know how I can set 1080i50 as video output on component video output. The ccc only presents me with 1080i30 option.

... just came across this (http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/443/1/) article. Guru3D nicely compared the cards and t's a interesting read ... however I'm still not sure about the tests from the lately-much-hyped HD-HQV. Particularly, what are the "HD Noise Reduction" (why would anyone use that???) and "Jaggies" tests , how are they performed and why such gap between 2400 and 2600 series (only for those tests) ... I guess that they didn't used the 2400 registry hacks already discovered and published on this very forum. Also, results are pretty much in sync with TechReport review and bizarrely enough they conducted the tests in the "2560x1600" resolution :rolleyes:

Anyone with HD-HQV experience care to clarify ?

Here is the author comment about the scoring system:

Each test from the benchmark comes with a description and a few reference images each accumulating to a certain amount of points. We as reviewers then compare these images with the one the screen displayed content and awards points. This test is partly subjective yet when you understand the matter, can be extremely precise and thus an excellent method of ranking the image quality of HD content.

The final result is the sum of all the HQV tests. The maximum possible number of points for HQV-HD is 100; and thus would be the perfect score. At this very moment in time the HD 2600 XT outperforms everything quality wise and is scoring a near 100 points.

Could be:

1) The 2600 series are actually different in hardware. Seems a bit unlikely, because it would be simpler to just use the same setup in all the cards, but at different clocks. Also seems not to fit with the way the drivers address the cards. On top of that, you'd expect ATI to be advertising extra HTPC capabilities to sell higher end cards, and they haven't
afaik.

2) The lack of reg fiddling. Not having any VC1 interlaced material, I've no idea how it behaves on these cards, and more importantly whether the SORT options affect it. However, the default settings certainly need changed for interlaced HD h264 to get acceleration, so they might need the same with interlaced VC1 (and the same setting exists for VC1 that needs changed for h264 to work)

3) That the cards are smart enough to switch off postprocessing as they max out. Certainly running 1080i at 2500*1600 would be way too much for the 2400pro (it's 65-70%ish at 1600*1200), and quite likely for the 2400xt when you add in adaptive denoising as well.

I love this statement

So if you are about to build a HTPC at this moment in time; the final recommendation goes to one card and one card only: The AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT. It offers by far the best HD acceleration and image quality to date
I have the HD2600XT in the mail now

Could be:

1) The 2600 series are actually different in hardware. Seems a bit unlikely, because it would be simpler to just use the same setup in all the cards, but at different clocks. Also seems not to fit with the way the drivers address the cards. On top of that, you'd expect ATI to be advertising extra HTPC capabilities to sell higher end cards, and they haven't
afaik.

I have seen "Full 1080P" associated with the 2600. That might be marketing speek for we use the extra hardware to do more post processing.

Just a thought.

Someone who has their 2400 running should run the HQV test and post the results.

- Rich

Being there are more and more different brands of the 2600XT coming out is there any difference between them besides price?

Being there are more and more different brands of the 2600XT coming out is there any difference between them besides price?

Check out the specs on GPU and memory clock. Often they overclock them. Then, of course, there is the coolers. Gigabyte will have at least two models with passive cooling.

- Rich

Thanks for those drivers, I'm a techie but the reg hacks were not working. I think the newer driver and your package reg entries seem to have done it :cool:

It is important for me to have full acceleration because I am determined to use low power kit, I have Pentium M's all over the house and this rig only is single core 1.73ghz. I can now play everything with acceleration in conjuction with the latest Power DVD at 1280x1024 (test LCD) all with only 70 watts power draw at the wall. My Core2duo is drawing 175 watts doing the same thing :D

The quality jump is large on mpeg 2 1080i video such as concerts over other cards inc 8500gt, I have watched a lot of these files 2/3 times but now they look much much sharper properly deinterlaced.

However, mpeg 2 accel was almost certainly disabled for card load issues, I have a few video sourced 1080i files that it almost chokes on because they appear to be hard to deinterlace. 1080i material which is film based decodes with much less load on both cpu and gpu. I have o/c the card a little, +50mhz ram and core which brings me to about 92% gpu peak on a tuff clip and usually 60-70% on more normal video material.

VC1 and H264 1080p is a breeze in comparison, my cpu is actually throttling back to 1ghz (speedstep) and the films are playing smoothly. Bluray mpeg 2 seems good, I only have Black Hawk Down to test which has 40mbps peaks and I guess a 25mps+ average. All the UK 25fps/50hz 1080p h264 files I have are playing great with very very low load.

CPU load never goes over 50% at 1.73ghz and usually sits at about 90% throttled at 1ghz.

Pretty happy so far :) Once the software and drivers mature some more I'm sure it'll be enuff card to cover everything broadcast for some time. It is only the other day I bought a 8500gt to make a Pentium D 3ghz playback 1080p H264 and now I have that and more on a lowly Pentium M!

Sorry for being a noob on this issue - but everyone uses different players - I want to know - Does hardware acceleration work inside of Vista MCE? Using Vista's codec? I recently upgraded from MCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate, so my PowerDVD is not needed anymore (though it is Vista compliant).

Thanks!

I think the high load on MPEG2 might be from using AVIVO instead of AVIVO HD, AVIVO did everything in shaders from what I read. The only reason I think this is because I get a signifigantly lower GPU load decoding/deinterlacing a 24Mbit average 1080i h264 than I do a 20mbit mpeg2.


HKR, "UMD\DXVA",DXVA_TRDenoise, %REG_SZ%, "0"

That should be just TRDenoise right? I'm uploading a set for the XP/MCE users now, untested though so if there's problems don't blame me for choosing to use them over clicking 6 buttons to do the reg edits :D I just removed the 2 SORT and 3 FPS limit keys and added trdenoise dxva_detailenhance and dxva_nohddecode dwords for the 2400 line only.

http://rapidshare.com/files/42567550/hotfix_xp32_8-39-5-070625a-49541-tweaked.rar.html

Sorry for being a noob on this issue - but everyone uses different players - I want to know - Does hardware acceleration work inside of Vista MCE? Using Vista's codec? I recently upgraded from MCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate, so my PowerDVD is not needed anymore (though it is Vista compliant).

Thanks!

PowerDVD if installed, can be used inside VMCE which is what most will be doing I imagine because it allows you accelerated H264.

I believe Vista's codec does provide hardware acceleration on mpeg 2.

I think the high load on MPEG2 might be from using AVIVO instead of AVIVO HD, AVIVO did everything in shaders from what I read. The only reason I think this is because I get a signifigantly lower GPU load decoding/deinterlacing a 24Mbit average 1080i h264 than I do a 20mbit mpeg2.



That should be just TRDenoise right? I'm uploading a set for the XP/MCE users now, untested though so if there's problems don't blame me for choosing to use them over clicking 6 buttons to do the reg edits :D I just removed the 2 SORT and 3 FPS limit keys and added trdenoise dxva_detailenhance and dxva_nohddecode dwords for the 2400 line only.

http://rapidshare.com/files/42567550/hotfix_xp32_8-39-5-070625a-49541-tweaked.rar.html

The AVIVO vs AVIVO HD might be what is going on here and could be why the 2600 performs better than the 2400. I'm confused why they would implement h.264 and VC-1 deinterlacing differently than mpeg2 though. Makes little sense to me espcially when it works so well with the h264/VC-1. Do these formats require different methods? Is there no 3:2 pulldown or IVTC going on here? It could be that the codecs don't allow so many different cadences that it makes it easy to deinterlace. Or they may not be doing Vector Adaptive deinterlacing. These unified shaders in the DX10 cards are cool though. Even the 2400pro has 40 shaders (probably slower than previous shaders though) it can use. Before unified hardware, AVIVO only had 4 shaders in the 1300 and 16 in the 1600 for AVIVO calculations and the other 3D hardware in the pipelines was not used.

Really, I havn't played much with the h264 and vc-1 codecs because they are a lot rarer in the US, especially interlaced content. I am only concerned with 1080i playback of mpeg2 and 1080p decoding of HD media. So far, with the registry hacks and overclock it works well but admittedly that is only after 1 day of playing. Most of the time I was watching America's Got Talent. I still can't believe that Boy Shakira and the Pakistani guy both made it through.

Well I kind of meant in the codec end of things, like say it whatever codec you're using isn't compatable with DXVA 2 for Mpeg2 and falls back to using DXVA1, and the card switches over to the old shader mode that way instead of using UVD? It's just a wild guess though, I don't know how the underlying APIs work to be able to say that, and using the MS mpeg2 codec in vista in mediacenter or WMP11 evr mode should be able to rule that out since it should support dxva2 :D I have 0 problems with broadcast ATSC which is the main reason I bought the card so no complaints here :)

I have seen "Full 1080P" associated with the 2600. That might be marketing speek for we use the extra hardware to do more post processing.

Just a thought.


Yeah, I was wondering something similar. However, it would be a really odd way to describe it; 1080p is a cakewalk for this card, even 50mbit h264.


By the way, just noticed the default settings for the 2600 series have colour, fleshtone and detail enhancement cranked right up - tried the same thing on my card and it looked more than a bit fake. The first two you can undo in the control panel, the latter needs registry changes (UMD\DXVA",Detail, %REG_SZ%, "50"). The 2400 has them all set to zero, presumably because it doesn't have enough power.

Well I kind of meant in the codec end of things, like say it whatever codec you're using isn't compatable with DXVA 2 for Mpeg2 and falls back to using DXVA1, and the card switches over to the old shader mode that way instead of using UVD?

It certainly is weird that if you play something in VMR9 (ie dxva1) it eats a _bucketload_ more GPU resources than in EVR/dxva2. Fortunately the PDVD 7.3 decoder is compatible with both, but unfortunately my DVB app (dvbviewer) only has vmr9.

It certainly is weird that if you play something in VMR9 (ie dxva1) it eats a _bucketload_ more GPU resources than in EVR/dxva2. Fortunately the PDVD 7.3 decoder is compatible with both, but unfortunately my DVB app (dvbviewer) only has vmr9.

So you are saying that 1080i mpeg2 in vista does not eat up 80-90% of the gpu like on XP and reacts the same as h264?

I get 40-55% GPU usage on 1080i broadcast mpeg2 in MCE2005 at stock speeds..

I get 40-55% GPU usage on 1080i broadcast mpeg2 in MCE2005 at stock speeds..

Do you have 3:2 pulldown enabled in the CCC? What resolution are you scaling to? Do you have denoise and sharpen enabled?

For me: Yes, 720p, yes, yes.

I like the look of sharpen and denoise on SD and that is what most of my video is so I kept it. It didn't seem to add much load.

So you are saying that 1080i mpeg2 in vista does not eat up 80-90% of the gpu like on XP and reacts the same as h264?

At 1600*1200, 1080i50 h264 16mbit takes around 55%, and the nastiest 1080i 15mbit MPEG2 I could find takes around 95% - this is a really evil example, it's horrendously badly telecined with bad edits all over the place. The card makes a nice job of it though, my old 8500GT had a lot more trouble.

A more typical 1080i mpeg2 file with fairly consistent pulldown takes around 70%. The h264 was tennis though, so perhaps not the toughest to deinterlace (only a small amount of the screen is moving). Having said that, the mpeg2 also eats a chunk of CPU as well (only 10-15%, but compared to 2% for h264), so it clearly isn't being handled in the same manner as the h264.

This is with trdenoise and detailenhance switched off in the registry, whatever difference that makes. Deinterlace is set to default/auto, with pulldown. VMR9, you can add maybe 1/3rd more to the above figures, which of course makes fullscreen impossible.


System is a 3ghz core2duo, 2400pro, Vista 32, latest hotfix drivers with the "standard" tweaks.

I'm outputting at 1360x768 over HDMI, yes I have 3:2 pulldown enabled, deinterlacing on auto denoise and detailenhance are off, I use my TV cards denoise and sharpen for SD (TV Wonder 650) and it's all in VMR9/MCE2005. Have you tried other codecs to see if theres any difference? I'm using sonic 4.2 over cyberlink.

Actually, it may be the decoder I'm using causing it after all, it might only be offloading ivtc, postprocessing, mocomp to the card using the old DXVA methods instead of cyberlink using VLD offloading the entire process to the card. I'll have to mess with it later :)

I haven't tried other codecs yet. I have to wait to get home from work. It looks like my system is being more loaded then yours. I am using a recording of PBS Soundstage. The camera pans all over the place making deinterlacing difficult, though it is not a high bitrate source. The blocking on the recording probably makes deinterlacing hard though. Still, the 2400pro does a fantastic job at this and walks all over my old 7300LE that was not doing anything special to the video.

I think the high load on MPEG2 might be from using AVIVO instead of AVIVO HD, AVIVO did everything in shaders from what I read. The only reason I think this is because I get a signifigantly lower GPU load decoding/deinterlacing a 24Mbit average 1080i h264 than I do a 20mbit mpeg2.



That should be just TRDenoise right? I'm uploading a set for the XP/MCE users now, untested though so if there's problems don't blame me for choosing to use them over clicking 6 buttons to do the reg edits :D I just removed the 2 SORT and 3 FPS limit keys and added trdenoise dxva_detailenhance and dxva_nohddecode dwords for the 2400 line only.

http://rapidshare.com/files/42567550/hotfix_xp32_8-39-5-070625a-49541-tweaked.rar.html


A "very big "Thank you" from xp users! Haven't tried and tested, as I am sitting by my desk, with a bit of a hang over, and after typing this message are going to bed (although I slept all evening on the couch!)

Yes, sometimes I am not only busy with HC! :D Nice little Chardonnay though!

1) The 2600 series are actually different in hardware. Seems a bit unlikely, because it would be simpler to just use the same setup in all the cards, but at different clocks. Also seems not to fit with the way the drivers address the cards. On top of that, you'd expect ATI to be advertising extra HTPC capabilities to sell higher end cards, and they haven't
afaik.
I seriously doubt that there are any differences in "video hardware". Mostly bumped up GPU core and memory speed followed by 3D processing power - important for games only. Actually, it's quite possible that GPU core is only relevant figure here. It would be interesting to see GPU utilisation difference between safely over-clocked 2400 Pro (with registry hacks) and stock 2600XT.

Apart from the fact that I'm not huge fan of synthetic video benchmarks, I'm still puzzled about that HQV test and why only nr/jaggies scores are that much different and what's causing this. In my view, 2400 Pro is such perfect card for HTPC and it would be really shame if it's avoided by users - especially if figures from those tests are not applicable in practice ...

3) That the cards are smart enough to switch off postprocessing as they max out. Certainly running 1080i at 2500*1600 would be way too much for the 2400pro (it's 65-70%ish at 1600*1200), and quite likely for the 2400xt when you add in adaptive denoising as well.What erks me the most is lack of the "controlled" HTPC environment. Yeah, it's easy to show off with 2500*1600 and torture the card on 30" monitor and at the same time use Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme and ultra fancy hardware. It's utterly irrelevant in HTPC land where even 1080p is still not part of the mainstream and people are still using weak processors (with a reason too). Just look at the testing "HTPC" hardware spec from the Guru3D article. Come on, give me a break.

At the same time, we have no information about the decoders used and how video cards are configured at all (video settings).

no worries, took 10x longer to upload than to fix the inf :D let me know if you have any problems, looked over it again and there shouldn't be any but never know. You can't just provide a .reg to put the settings on because the GUID changes for everyone so you have to manually find the right key :( I'm in the process of wiping my system and starting over again right now so I can't try them out. Some update I keep installing is not letting me use US analog tuning frequencies in MCE2005.. Every time I wipe out the tvautotune key and download a new guide it only populates it with EU tuning spaces.. I keep sticking with MCE2005 because I absolutely hate vista's my movies thumbnail view. Why wont they just provide a list view already :D

What erks me the most is lack of the "controlled" HTPC environment. Yeah, it's easy to show off with 2500*1600 and torture the card on 30" monitor and at the same time use Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme and ultra fancy hardware. It's utterly irrelevant in HTPC land where even 1080p is still not part of the mainstream and people are still using weak processors (with a reason too). Just look at the testing "HTPC" hardware spec from the Guru3D article. Come on, give me a break.

At the same time, we have no information about the decoders used and how video cards are configured at all (video settings).

For real! By far the best and most informative review I've found is the hardspell one, if you can get past the language/grammar barrier :D

http://www.hardspell.com/english/doc/showcont.asp?news_id=927&pageid=1216

The spec contrast table on the second page is wrong, but the rest of it has some really good info (especially the DXVA2 part)

What is the difference between the GDDR2, GDDR3 & GDDR4?

I seriously doubt that there are any differences in "video hardware".

Me either tbh.

By the way, tried overclocking the 2400pro from 525>600mhz. Fullscreen in EVR, 1080i50 h264 drops from 56>51%.

Going back to stock core, and increasing memory from 400>450, made absolutely no difference to GPU % at all. It's a very stable clip, only wobbles within a 2% band, so any change is pretty obvious. At least for this, it looks like the card has enough bandwidth that more makes no difference.

Edit: upped it to 500mhz memory, the gpu usage actually increase a few %. Dropped it back to 400mhz, it's back to 56%. Maybe it increases latency at higher speeds, and that makes more difference.

Hi there, I have been reading these threads with interest, but I can't really read them all. If this has been already mentioned, please direct me to the posts.

I have the 2400 pro. Pentium dual core 1.8 GHz OC'd to 2.25GHz, Zalman 8000, 2 GB RAM. Asus P5K-VM.

I installed the hotfix for Vista, and now CCC is showing a couple of new options. But now when opening anything on PowerDVD 7.3 it takes a long time, long enough for Vista (32 bit) to ask me if I wanna continue waiting or close the non-responding program. If I wait it eventually opens (DVD, HD-DVD, whatever) but still takes a long time.

Another thing, this driver didn't fix the problem I'm having watching regular DVDs at full-screen 1920x1200 with acceleration. Using Riva Tuner I can tell when watching DVDs that the GPU is maxing out at full-screen. Not so with HD-DVDs, AVC or VC1. Also on DVDs the screen flickers high/low contrast. But this doesn't happen with HDTV OTA broadcasts.

So what's up? Does anyone know if it's the processor's fault (so I should upgrade GPUs) or if it's a driver issue? I tried also the registry fixes mentioned in previous pages, and nothing, still the same high GPU consumption. This happens both with DVDs and 1080i and 720p HDTV OTA broadcasts. It seems that it is indeed accelerating MPEG2, but maybe not doing it as efficiently as it should. The registry fixes made no difference in this.

I really like this card because of it being lightweight and silent. I don't care about 3D performance, but at least it should accelerate DVDs properly. The PowerDVD sluggishness startup issue with this hotfix is annoying as well, but I'll see if reinstalling PDVD helps.

Thanks for any help.

So far I have found the HD2600's from Powercolor, HIS, Diamond Viper, Gigabyte, Sapphire, Asus and of course ATI.

The Sapphire AT-2600XT has the highest memory clock of 2.2GHz and is a DDR4 (whatever that means).

Arfster,

Thanks for doing my work for me. I'll still be at work until 7pm PST so I couldn't do my test until then.

The Sapphire 2400XT looks interesting - it's still fanless, but you get 700mhz compared to the 2400pro's 525mhz, and nearly double the memory speed (1400mhz rather than 800).

Might be this 2400xt is actually better for video stuff than the 2600pro, given it's 150mhz faster. Half the memory bandwidth sure, but maybe that doesn't matter (12Gb/sec vs 24) past a certain point.

What's the word on the 2400 doing automatic levels expansion? I don't think I could live with that.

I really want to see what people with the 2600pro show for their GPU % 700mhz doesn't seem like enough headroom for me when going from 525 -> 600 was only 4% decrease. That would be about a 10% decrease for the 2400XT if you are right about the memory not being a factor.

Gigabyte has a 2600pro will a simple extruded fanless heatsink that should work just fine. Where are all the folks with the 2600pro? It is really easy to download RivaTuner, then tell us your GPU load.

I really want to see what people with the 2600pro show for their GPU % 700mhz doesn't seem like enough headroom for me when going from 525 -> 600 was only 4% decrease. That would be about a 10% decrease for the 2400XT if you are right about the memory not being a factor.


True, although perhaps with the 2400pro it's all being negated by higher latencies. If the 2400xt has memory designed to run at that speed.....

Did another test, with that really bad 1080i mpeg2 clip I mentioned earlier. At default 400/800 ram, it's about 96%. At 480/960, it's 84%. Going the whole hog and overclocking the core to 600mhz as well as the 480/960, it came down to about 80%. Again the -4%, so it's not even scaling with the greater demands. It's not stable either at this speed :-)

Thus it looks like for the other clip it had more than enough bandwidth for its needs, whereas this one with the constant bad edits and much more demanding deinterlacing was just gagging for the extra memory bandwidth.

Also, even at 480/960, that's only increasing the bandwidth to 8Gbit/sec. A 2400xt would have 50% more than even that overclocked figure as well as 175mhz more clock speed, and a 2600pro almost three times as much bandwidth with around the same clock.

2600 line has 120 shaders (well "stream processors") though compared to the 40 on the 2400 so it'd gain a heck of alot more from each 1mhz with how things are now. The 2600 shouldn't show much of a difference with a progressive source.. The UVD part is supposed to be the same on both cards, which handles the decoding, pulldown, deblocking and all that. It looks like the AVP part of the avivo HD process is handled through the shaders so deinterlacing, scaling, and color correction would benefit from the extra GPU resources if that's the case. It's weird that GPU's are getting taxed so much with mpeg2, maybe all of the mpeg2 codecs are using a method that does everything in shaders like they set up for the 2900 or something? I got just fine h264 and VC1 and mpeg2 HD-DVD acceleration in powerdvd without the DXVA_NOHDDECODE option set, but had problems using mpeg2 in mediacenter with any directshow decoder.. the key only exists for old AVIVO DXVA1 cards. cyberlink uses a different decoder for HD-DVD/bluray than they do for generic mpeg2/dvds in powerdvd from what I can tell, and I'm thinking maybe that key existing might just make it use some kind of fallback acceleration mode that does the UVD stuff in shaders if theres no alternative or something.. Anyway I'm just thinking out loud. As a side note, does anyone know of a way to determine what DXVA2 capabilities are in use currently? I can only see DXVA1 modes if they're in use in graphedit.

edit: memory bandwidth/speed really shouldn't really matter much, its working with individual frames here and 1 second (60 frames) of 1920x1080 in 12 bit RGB is what, 250MB? the latency going down as you increase the speed might make a tiny difference but core speeds are where the increases will be had IMO..

I'm thinking of getting rid of the 2400 pro and getting a 2600 pro and swap the cooler for a Zalman fanless VNF100. I'm not really going for cheap anyway, but more for lightweight and silent. The 2400 pro looks so promising to be my ideal HTPC card, but the problems I pointed above are just too much. Hopefully it will be fixed with drivers, but the hotfix didn't give me more hope.

Anyone having the same trouble as me (or any trouble) with the 2400 playing regular 480p DVDs in PowerDVD 7.3 full-screen in a 1920x1200 monitor? As I said above, I am getting stuttering, the GPU is maxing out (as per Riva Tuner) and screen contrast flickering (only inside the video overlay).

I'm thinking of getting rid of the 2400 pro and getting a 2600 pro and swap the cooler for a Zalman fanless VNF100. I'm not really going for cheap anyway, but more for lightweight and silent. The 2400 pro looks so promising to be my ideal HTPC card, but the problems I pointed above are just too much. Hopefully it will be fixed with drivers, but the hotfix didn't give me more hope.


Do you know if the VNF100 can be used with a 2400 Pro?

- Rich

Hehe, I'm working all on assumptions now. I just bought the Zalman cooler, it's pretty new, so you'll have to pay about 50 bucks, there's not many stores to choose from. I bought it from sharkacomputers(dot)com. Never head of that store before, but they seem to have very good ratings. Maybe others more knowledgeable here know it.

In any case, The 2400 pro doesn't need it, since many of them come already fanless. The Powercolor one looks very nice, it has one heatpipe, so the heatsink is not as big, and the card itself is tinier than even the Sapphire. I would have bought that one had it come out a week earlier. Damn!

But I still don't know if the 2400 pro is supposed to be that underpowered when scaling regular DVDs to 1920x1200 or it's just a driver issue. I haven't gotten the 2600 pro yet, but if I can find it at fry's tomorrow I'll probably get it. If the Zalman cooler doesn't fit, I have another computer I've been planning on silencing too, with a X1900 GT, which hopefully it will fit in.

I have taken the latest "update" from Powerdvd. Guess what?

I got the movies dispayed in 4/3 in stead of 16/9! Now 48 hz is just impossible!

I get macro-blocking and green flashes.

In other players everything seem more or less fine, but then the HA of the card is not used..... :mad:

I seriously doubt that there are any differences in "video hardware". Mostly bumped up GPU core and memory speed followed by 3D processing power - important for games only. Actually, it's quite possible that GPU core is only relevant figure here. It would be interesting to see GPU utilisation difference between safely over-clocked 2400 Pro (with registry hacks) and stock 2600XT.

Apart from the fact that I'm not huge fan of synthetic video benchmarks, I'm still puzzled about that HQV test and why only nr/jaggies scores are that much different and what's causing this. In my view, 2400 Pro is such perfect card for HTPC and it would be really shame if it's avoided by users - especially if figures from those tests are not applicable in practice ...



The chips are totally different (while the UVD part may still be identical to the 2600):

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2007q3/radeon-hd-2400-2600/index.x?pg=2

What is the difference between the GDDR2, GDDR3 & GDDR4?
1 or 2?

Later revisions allow for higher clocks, lower power consumption and decreased cooling. You can Google for exact details.

In terms of actual performance, for the lower range of these cards (aka not a 2900) GDDR3 is fine. One review I saw showed a 2-3 FPS difference between 2600XTs with GDDR3 and GDDR4. Considering it looks like there'll be around a $50 price premium (50% higher!) cost for DDR4, it's probably not worth it.

I'm still waiting on a passive 2600XT with GDDR3.

XP HD 2400 users may try :

DL .. "findreg "

This little app will determine the right string of your HD 2400 pro

Regedit >HKEY _Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\

Now find the correspondent string that will look like this..... 68AACE4......

scroll down until you find :

DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264
DXVA_Only24FPS1080MPEG2
DXVA_Only24FPS1080VC1

change string from 1 to 0

__________

Right click ..enter : New DWORD

SORTOverrideFPSCaps ..........0
TRDenoise .............................0
DXVA_NOHDDECODE........................0

HD 2400:

With new Cyberlink patch and beta 7.6 ( in this thread) :

H.264 DXVA

1080 i MPEG2 DXVA >20 Mbit @ 9 % CPU

Hardwarechanges:
______________
Sapphire HD 2400
OC 560/460 by Rivatuner (don`t use ATI Overdrive ..doesn`t work correctly)

Seems directshow apps work now (MPClassic-WMP - DVBViewer) with H.264 and MPEG2 HD in Overlay and VMR 7 and EVR
with vector- and Motion adaptive deinterlacing.....

Sorry can`t test HDDVDs and BR ..waiting for a BR Burner @ 100Euros

Best
Mine (kudos go to DVL73 - arfster - sarvatt and others)

Woaw mine, if that works you are my hero!!! :) :) :)

The beta version, you mention "this tread", I don't know where you mean....

Have you tried this with the latest powerstrip in 48 HZ? (47.975)?

yes , you find the dl link above (XP patch)

I am sorry mine, this is a bit complicated in my limited English... :o


With new Cyberlink patch and beta 7.6 ( in this thread) :

Now there are many links in this tread. The Ati drivers I have for XP ARE regular 7.6, from the ATI site. Is this something else?

go to support.ati.com

737-28254 Slow performance.... click
knowledge base

on the right side you will find a dl -link to the XP beta drivers

737-28298

Thank You Very Much! :)

1 or 2?

Later revisions allow for higher clocks, lower power consumption and decreased cooling. You can Google for exact details.

In terms of actual performance, for the lower range of these cards (aka not a 2900) GDDR3 is fine. One review I saw showed a 2-3 FPS difference between 2600XTs with GDDR3 and GDDR4. Considering it looks like there'll be around a $50 price premium (50% higher!) cost for DDR4, it's probably not worth it.

I'm still waiting on a passive 2600XT with GDDR3.

Thanks for the response. The only ones I have found so far that are passive are by Powercolor. They are for the Pro models and have only GDDR2.

This is the one I am looking at hard. It is about middle of the pack on price. I did not know if I could put the actual cost here are not. I found it at ewiz.

The Sapphire AT-2600XT has the highest memory clock of 2.2GHz and is a DDR4. This one has the highest memory clock speed of all. It is about middle of the pack on price. I did not know if I could put the actual cost here are not. I found it at ewiz.

When installing the Catalyst Hotfix is it best to remove all the old driver software or is this a patch that is just applied on top of the existing 7.6 driver?

When installing the Catalyst Hotfix is it best to remove all the old driver software or is this a patch that is just applied on top of the existing 7.6 driver?

They're supposed to uninstall all the old software themselves, but imo it's best to do it manually just in case.

2600 line has 120 shaders (well "stream processors") though compared to the 40 on the 2400 so it'd gain a heck of alot more from each 1mhz with how things are now.

Yeah, good point, didn't think about that. However what's being done in shaders? The deinterlacing isn't, you can see it affect the single UVD core, but sharpening and denoising might as these don't seem to be affect GPU %.

edit: memory bandwidth/speed really shouldn't really matter much, its working with individual frames here and 1 second (60 frames) of 1920x1080 in 12 bit RGB is what, 250MB?

Something like that, but that's 2Gbit/sec needed to transfer that :-) I guess it depends how many times per frame it has to access stuff.

I figure there's bitstream analysis to determine if it's film or video, then more analysis to determine the best type of deinterlacing to use, then the deinterlacing itself. The latter is probably what's really dealing out the hurt, since it has to compare back and forward a few frames to determine what's moving. Doesn't take much for the 2400pro's 7Gbit/sec to be eaten up.

By the way, repeated the test, with the same results. 96%>84% from o/cing the memory 400/800 to 480/960. It clearly is needing the extra speed there, just not for that other clip strangely. Might try rigging up some of my hurricane-strength 120mm fans later, to see how far it can be pushed.

Oh, and you're right about PDVD with mpeg2. The HDNODECODE makes no difference to that, and my bluray mpeg2 discs still don't get accelerated (greyed out box). That change is purely for directshow codecs - you can see it work with them all, whether dxva1 or dxva2.

regular [/U]7.6, from the ATI site. Is this something else?

Yup - in this thread, somebody took the latest beta XP drivers mine mentions from the ATI site, and made the registry changes within the install package. Thus, you just need to install it and you get all the needed changes automatically.

I tried the new Vista32 drivers with the registry changes and I still cannot HW accelarate with my 2400Pro.

Must be something else.

- Rich

I tried the new Vista32 drivers with the registry changes and I still cannot HW accelarate with my 2400Pro.


Weird - do any accelerated formats work at all? If you look a the pin details between decoder/renderer in graphedit, does it mention dxva in the subtype (for software it'll just say YUY2).

For all those interested, i plugged the ATI DVI/HDMI dongle.

The audio is intermittent, one second of sound every five seconds at best. Vista recognized it since the video card was installed.

Still have a severe underscan problem that cant be resolved with all the registry hacks from other threads.

Returning it today.

Anyone have any luck getting the Cyberlink H.264 decoder to work with a direct show player like Zoomplayer? I keep getting pin errors. I put it place of my CoreAVC decoder with no luck.

Anyone have any luck getting the Cyberlink H.264 decoder to work with a direct show player like Zoomplayer? I keep getting pin errors. I put it place of my CoreAVC decoder with no luck.

It worls in KM player, but strangely I do not get any H/W acceleration!!!!

With new Cyberlink patch and beta 7.6 ( in this thread) :

Ok, I did all that. On my normal 4/3 monitor, everything looked right; I thought I was finished. NOT

When I connected my pc to my ruby, it was clear, that I still have some work to do.....

Main problem is, after the latest Pwdvd up date, the movie get displayed in 4/3, instead of 16/9. On a French forum, somebody has the same problem.

48 hz (47.95) , is still not working. Blocks and green flashes, still are there!!!

Now if there is no solution for this, I can maybe try with the latest PWDVD version, without the update, and then Use Anydvd, to play the latest files.

Mpeg 2 acceleration works after changing the registry. But when I play European Broadcast H 264 in Kmplayer, Cpu is around 75 %, which means H/W acceleration doesn't work. Using the cyberlink decoder and Matroska. This doesn't matter, although the cpu is a bit high, it works without stuttering.

Mpeg 2 acceleration works after changing the registry. But when I play European Broadcast H 264 in Kmplayer, Cpu is around 75 %, which means H/W acceleration doesn't work. Using the cyberlink decoder and Matroska. This doesn't matter, although the cpu is a bit high, it works without stuttering.

The problem with European 1080i50 h264 is the DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264 key. It defaults to 1 with the 2400, and you get the problem you describe above. Like NVidia, ATI seem unaware that a world exists outside North America.

Do this for xp:

1) start menu, run, regedit
2) edit/find DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264
3) change it to 0
4) close, and reboot (not sure it's needed, but do it anyway).


For Vista the same, but the reboot isn't needed.

I tried 2400 pro with the official drivers (plus the registry changes recommended here). My results are pretty much the same as everyone else has reported, with one big exception. The thing cannot cope with very high bitrate H.264 1080i HD DVD. My torture test disc (Heart - Alive at Seattle HD DVD, 20-26 Mbps H.264 1080i 60 Hz) killed it. It dropped frames horrendously, more than the 7950 GT I had a while ago. CPU was at 10-15%, GPU at 25%, but it dropped like 15-20% of the frames. My resolution is 1280x720. For comparison Nvidai's 8500GT does not drop a single frame on this disc.
For every progressive hi-def DVD the 2400pro had no problem and the picture is excellent. Maybe this deinterlacing of this type of material is too much for this card. I tried to overclock it, but got the first blue screens of death (I haven't seen those for many months) when I tried to play the same disc.
IMO this card is not strong enough to handle HD DVD and Blu-ray.

P.S. I tried changing the deinterlace algorithm in Catalyst Control Panel from Auto to Vector adaptive, but that made things much worse - like a slideshow.

I tried 2400 pro with the official drivers (plus the registry changes recommended here). My results are pretty much the same as everyone else has reported, with one big exception. The thing cannot cope with very high bitrate H.264 1080i HD DVD. My torture test disc (Heart - Alive at Seattle HD DVD, 20-26 Mbps H.264 1080i 60 Hz) killed it. It dropped frames horrendously, more than the 7950 GT I had a while ago. CPU was at 10-15%, GPU at 25%, but it dropped like 15-20% of the frames. My resolution is 1280x720. For comparison Nvidai's 8500GT does not drop a single frame on this disc.

Aha, now that's interesting, a different type of error. Since the GPU isn't maxxed, it must be too much for the card's memory bandwidth.

For all those interested, i plugged the ATI DVI/HDMI dongle.

The audio is intermittent, one second of sound every five seconds at best. Vista recognized it since the video card was installed.

Still have a severe underscan problem that cant be resolved with all the registry hacks from other threads.

Returning it today.

Hey, I also had the underscan problem, but somehow got rid of it today. The thing is that I'm not sure if 7.6 showed it, probably not or I am blind, but there is an underscan/overscan option in CCC, when you apply the hotfix referenced earlier. You have to have an HDTV connected and recognized I think, since it doesn't show when I connect my PC LCD.

Hope that helps.

I am still having trouble playing REGULAR DVD's upscaled to full-screen 1920x1200 (1920x1080 size, I guess). My GPU maxes out and the picture starts stuttering. I can only imagine what HD 1080i MPEG2 content will do. Thinking of getting the 9600 pro fanless.

I am still having trouble playing REGULAR DVD's upscaled to full-screen 1920x1200 (1920x1080 size, I guess). My GPU maxes out and the picture starts stuttering. I can only imagine what HD 1080i MPEG2 content will do. Thinking of getting the 9600 pro fanless.

I had that as well at some point - it appeared that pulldown wasn't working, so the card was trying to do full vector adaptive deinterlacing on something with no interlacing :-) Unticking pulldown, applying, then reticking fixed it.

On a 1600*1200 screen, I get around 55% GPU for DVDs. HD 1080i MPEG2 to the same size results in 65-95, depending on how tricky the interlacing is to handle, how many bad edits there are etc.

I try to install Any dvd, which I do not need as I have HDPC.

Without the latest patch, the latest HDDVD do not work!

Has anybody got the same problem as I, that with the latest PWDVD patch the display is in 4/3 instead of 16/9?

Can't find any sollution to this last problem (with the 48 hz weirdness).

getting no sound using the dvi-hdmi supplied dongle.
I have a creative Sound Blaster X-Fi card installed?
Am I doing something wrong?

The thing cannot cope with very high bitrate H.264 1080i HD DVD. My torture test disc (Heart - Alive at Seattle HD DVD, 20-26 Mbps H.264 1080i 60 Hz) killed it. It dropped frames horrendously, more than the 7950 GT I had a while ago. CPU was at 10-15%, GPU at 25%, but it dropped like 15-20% of the frames. My resolution is 1280x720. For comparison Nvidai's 8500GT does not drop a single frame on this disc.I believe that memory bandwidth for your 8500GT was around 11-12GB/s (exactly the same 800MHz DDR2 clock but 128-bit bus width). In some sense 2400XT is probably more suitable as direct opponent to 8500GT.

Anyhow, you should try to over-clock just memory (in order to increase the fill rate) and see how things are developing.I think that 500Mhz (1000Mhz DDR2) is easily achievable. Of course, it may happen that issue is not memory or hardware related at the end - maybe decoder/driver problem. I wish that I can source somewhere such high demanding 1080i H.264 clips @60hz streams and test on my 2400 Pro & 720P LCD TV. Will see ...

Weird - do any accelerated formats work at all? If you look a the pin details between decoder/renderer in graphedit, does it mention dxva in the subtype (for software it'll just say YUY2).

How do I obtain this information?
It is not that important, I already got the RMA for the 2400Pro and my 2600Pro should be here on Monday. I suspect there is some kind of incompatibility with my Asus A8N (NForce4) motherboard.

Thanks for you help though,

- Rich

Like NVidia, ATI seem unaware that a world exists outside North America.

Sure there is, but does it matter at all?

:D

j/k

getting no sound using the dvi-hdmi supplied dongle.
I have a creative Sound Blaster X-Fi card installed?
Am I doing something wrong?


Did you enable the sound on the ATI card?

Can I ask what kind of gpu temps people are getting?

You can check in the ccc using the latest beta. I've a Sapphire 2400 Pro passive. As soon as the temps hit 54 I get corruption when watching a VC1 or h.264 video. The gpu is nowhere near maxed out and acceleration is certainly working when checked via PowerDVD. But I'm getting temps of 55 to 64 without my case cover on!. So the card is pretty much unusable.

I'd like to check to see if others are getting coruption at these temps. But I'm pretty sure the card is faulty.

Can I ask what kind of gpu temps people are getting?

You can check in the ccc using the latest beta. I've a Sapphire 2400 Pro passive. As soon as the temps hit 54 I get corruption when watching a VC1 or h.264 video. The gpu is nowhere near maxed out and acceleration is certainly working when checked via PowerDVD. But I'm getting temps of 55 to 64 without my case cover on!. So the card is pretty much unusable.

I'd like to check to see if others are getting coruption at these temps. But I'm pretty sure the card is faulty.

My guess is the corruption is not due to the temperature. I've been testing it in an awfully hot room (over 30C), the case is fully closed, only fan being that on the power unit. The GPU temperature is around 70-80, but I've watched a few HD DVD movies no problem.

I don't know about ATI cards, but my last Nvidia 7300 LE card ran in the 90C range under load. The card throttled at 130C so this was no problem. Nvidia graphics cards show the die temperature, unlike CPUs which show the casing temperature, and can handle extreme temperatures. I'm assuming ATI is similar. Check your heatsink temp, if it is too hot to touch for more than a second, then your GPU may be too hot. Your problems could be the result of something else, like bad memory.

My torture test disc (Heart - Alive at Seattle HD DVD, 20-26 Mbps H.264 1080i 60 Hz) killed it. It dropped frames horrendously, more than the 7950 GT I had a while ago. CPU was at 10-15%, GPU at 25%, but it dropped like 15-20% of the frames.

Any chance you could pass along a clip of it? It sounds to me like you are running into the powerdvd 20fps bug, if you can check the renderer in the graph you should see no dropped frames yet only a steady 20 fps output if so. the fact nothing is loaded is a sign it's a decoder/driver/setting issue and not a fault of the card itself in my opinion :D

Doesn't take much for the 2400pro's 7Gbit/sec to be eaten up

It has 7 gigaBYTES/s though, thats why I gave a number in MB instead of Mb.. :D Are you positive UVD usage gets shown by rivatuner? I went looking through the SDK to get more info on how it monitors but I don't see the GPU load monitoring module in the source. Rivatuner's rv610 monitoring is a little wonky as it is, notice how the clocks dont change on the graph when you change them? I was assuming the i2c just reported the load on the actual GPU and not the UVD load because I get the same GPU loads from an unaccelerated video playback as I do for a progressive one without deinterlacing or color adjustments with hardware acceleration (outside of mpeg2). One thing that bugs me is there are Powerplay speeds in the cards bios but I'm not able to adjust the settings in vista or MCE. Who knows if my card was clocking down to the lower speeds because of the power profile I picked or whatever :D

I got my HDMI dongle today, it has 6 pins more than my DVI-HDMI adapter does so no wonder audio wasn't working :D I think a normal DVI-HDMI adapter might work if you have one that has all of the pins, not a single link connector like mine was. Pics of the different connector types here, the adapter has a dual link DVI-D plug - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DVI_Connector_Types.svg

Sound works fine on it, just wish my TV had a SPDIF passthrough to actually want to use it. I do get random corruption over HDMI sometimes depending what resolution I'm running at, only while playing back accelerated content and doing something else like moving around windows.. Haven't had that since switching to the HDMI though (jinxing myself). I really hate how ATI handles resolutions, when I use 1360x768 it apparently runs at 1920x1080i and shrinks down the desktop then scales that back up and reports different refresh rates all over the place.. At least VGA just plain works as it should.

Can I ask what kind of gpu temps people are getting?

around 40 idle 60 load at 625/1000

Did you enable the sound on the ATI card?
I can't find anywhere on the card to enable sound.

Any chance you could pass along a clip of it? It sounds to me like you are running into the powerdvd 20fps bug,

It's only mkv files that happens with, afaik. The same videos when put into other containers work fine, including EVO ones.


It has 7 gigaBYTES/s though, thats why I gave a number in MB instead of Mb.. :D Are you positive UVD usage gets shown by rivatuner?


Hehe yes, 7GB rather than 7Gb is a fairly big difference. Scratch that theory. Still, there is a clear and consistent difference in GPU% as you overclock the memory, at least for 1080i video material.

Also, I think rivatuner does represent GPU usage accurately enough, because you get jitter/framedrop the instant it hits 100%. It also differs a lot for me between 1080i material with film flags and deinterlaceable material, by about 60 to 90%. Most of that is a fixed 50% from outputting at 1080p - the larger the output resolution the more this fixed chunk increases, but deinterlacing work goes on top of that. Regardless of whether hardware acceleration is on or not, the card still has to scale and output that 2gbit/sec.

Weird - do any accelerated formats work at all? If you look a the pin details between decoder/renderer in graphedit, does it mention dxva in the subtype (for software it'll just say YUY2).

What does it mean if it says NV12. What does that stand for anyway? I assume it is accelerated because the GPU is being used heavily.

Anyone find any of these cards at Fry's? I'd like to pick up a 2400xt or 2600pro and play around with it. I don't want to wait on the mail.

What does it mean if it says NV12. What does that stand for anyway? I assume it is accelerated because the GPU is being used heavily.

I'll answer my own question :)

NV12 from MSDN

All of the Y samples are found first in memory as an array of unsigned char values with an even number of lines. The Y plane is followed immediately by an array of unsigned char values that contains packed U (Cb) and V (Cr) samples, as shown in Figure 13. When the combined U-V array is addressed as an array of little-endian WORD values, the LSBs contain the U values, and the MSBs contain the V values. NV12 is the preferred 4:2:0 pixel format for DirectX VA. It is expected to be an intermediate-term requirement for DirectX VA accelerators supporting 4:2:0 video

SO NV12 is just the pixel format of the decoded video and it would seem to be the preferred format for DXVA

Too bad I returned my card yesterday - I wanted to do more tests!

But - with the problems I and most others here have, it was probably worth returning anyways. :)

With my 7900GT card I get around 40-60% CPU usage in VMR9 with subtitles enabled and KMPlayer, on h.264 30 metabit/sec avg bitrate material. And it is rock solid with no video corruption and PQ just as good as the ATI card.

If you have a C2D with a bit of overclock, you can play everything without going insane over buggy ATI drivers/hardware.

arfster: Have you tried the Blu-ray or HD-DVD HQV Benchmark yet? Or the HD-DVD Video Essentials disc?

The problem with European 1080i50 h264 is the DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264 key. It defaults to 1 with the 2400, and you get the problem you describe above. Like NVidia, ATI seem unaware that a world exists outside North America.

.

I, a North American, was unaware that a world existed for this kind of stuff outside of NA. Even though the 2400PRO comes with that NTSC/PAL jumper set to PAL. That's why I asked that question about how you got the 16 Mbps data stream.

I started reading that Hardpsell review of the 2400/2600 but paused at this page, which has a nice picture labeled "HDTV bring audience wonderful vision"

Hardspell 24002600 review nice photo (http://http://www.hardspell.com/english/doc/showcont.asp?news_id=927&pageid=1215)

I still haven't checked if I get any kind of accelaration in Vista, but thanks to all the people who've done the hard work on this.

All,

before I purchase one of these cards can anyone say if a P4 2.4Ghz CPU will be capable of running a HD-DVD or Bluray disc with one of these cards installed? Anyone out there tested on a system like this....or do I need a complete overhaul?

Thanks!

Anyone find any of these cards at Fry's? I'd like to pick up a 2400xt or 2600pro and play around with it. I don't want to wait on the mail.

Fry's doesn't carry any of these yet, or the 8400GS's either. Basically, these cards are cheaper and more powerful than the older cards they sell, so if they carried them no one would buy a 7300GS or 1950 anymore.

I think mail order is your best bet.

Thanks,
Mike

arfster: Have you tried the Blu-ray or HD-DVD HQV Benchmark yet? Or the HD-DVD Video Essentials disc?

I have DVE, but its menus don't like PDVD :-) Not really inclined to spend more money on HQV tbh, especially given its mainly just a marketing tool (guess who gets perfect scores? yes, it's Silicon Optix, the makers of HQV *snore*)



I, a North American, was unaware that a world existed for this kind of stuff outside of NA.


You aren't a global company with 145325345 engineers making millions of video cards though :-)



SO NV12 is just the pixel format of the decoded video and it would seem to be the preferred format for DXVA


For DXVA2 yes, for dxva1 it's YV12. Software mode is generally YUY2, but you can convert or use pretty much anything as long as the next filter in the chain doesn't choke on it.

Max,

Currently the ATI HD2400 and HD2600 are the only video cards that can do advanced deinterlacing (more than just a bob or weave) on vc-1, and h264. The quality of interlaced HD with these cards is amazing once you get it working.

It is amazing that the 2400pro can handle HD deinterlacing (with registry hacks). I am in awe of this card and I'm hoping the support will only improve. It will probably turn out that the 2400pro is not capable of HD deinterlacing for all 1080i material, but I tested all my HD on my server and GPU never creeped aboove 95% and averaged 45% for 720p, and 85% for 1080i at 585/500. Cpu was 15-35% on a 3200+. So far for me, it has enough power for anything I throw at it. Also, so far h264 has worked great and allows me to play HD media. MKVs give me a little trouble because sagetv will not accelerate them, but other players work fine.

So, if you want HD hardware deinterlacing on h264 or VC-1, right now only the 2400 and 2600 can offer that.

Max,

Currently the ATI HD2400 and HD2600 are the only video cards that can do advanced deinterlacing (more than just a bob or weave) on HD media. This includes mpeg2, vc-1, and h264. The quality of interlaced HD with these cards is amazing once you get it working.

...

It is amazing that the 2400pro can handle HD deinterlacing (with registry hacks). I am in awe of this card and I'm hoping the support will only improve. It will probably turn out that the 2400pro is not capable of HD deinterlacing for all 1080i material, but I tested all my HD on my server and GPU never creeped aboove 95% and averaged 45% for 720p, and 85% for 1080i at 585/500. Cpu was 15-35% on a 3200+. So far for me, it has enough power for anything I throw at it. Also, so far h264 has worked great and allows me to play HD media. MKVs give me a little trouble because sagetv will not accelerate them, but other players work fine.

So, if you want HD hardware deinterlacing, right now only the 2400 and 2600 can offer that. Max, I'll see you back in this forum soon as we work out the issues.

Competition is good! AMD vs. Intel, AMD/ATI vs Nvidia.

If the 2400pro is insufficent for de-interlacing all 1080i, will the 2400XT do it? Only a small price difference.

Out of curiosity, why do you use the SageTV player? I use beyondTV for recording ATSC HD streams. For playback, I use whatever player (WMP, VLC, Nero whatever) is handy on the PC I am at to play the .tp streams. Just curious.

Max,

Currently the ATI HD2400 and HD2600 are the only video cards that can do advanced deinterlacing (more than just a bob or weave) on HD media. This includes mpeg2, vc-1, and h264. The quality of interlaced HD with these cards is amazing once you get it working.

Most of us here are concerned with hardware acceleration because without hardware acceleration enabled, all we get is simple software HD deinterlacing like your 7900GT does. We are much more concerned with video quality than CPU use. The low CPU use is just a nice perk and indicates that our hardware deinterlacing is working. However, low cpu use is great for me since I use a single core athlon, but is not really my main concern.

If you are happy with your 7900gt then you should stick with it. But you should know that eventually you are going to want the hardware deinterlacing for HD. It seems Nvidia is working on enabling this feature, but so far only the 8X00 series cards with purevideo 2 are capable of it. Also, and i am speaking from memory of a rumor, that the 8600GTS is the only Nvidia card that could handle hardware HD deinterlacing with beta drivers.

It is amazing that the 2400pro can handle HD deinterlacing (with registry hacks). I am in awe of this card and I'm hoping the support will only improve. It will probably turn out that the 2400pro is not capable of HD deinterlacing for all 1080i material, but I tested all my HD on my server and GPU never creeped aboove 95% and averaged 45% for 720p, and 85% for 1080i at 585/500. Cpu was 15-35% on a 3200+. So far for me, it has enough power for anything I throw at it. Also, so far h264 has worked great and allows me to play HD media. MKVs give me a little trouble because sagetv will not accelerate them, but other players work fine.

So, if you want HD hardware deinterlacing, right now only the 2400 and 2600 can offer that. Max, I'll see you back in this forum soon as we work out the issues.

Autoboy, since you seem to be running SageTV fine under Vista with this card and getting amazing playback, can you outline the specific parameters you are using for Sage in terms of driver, codec, settings etc...? Or better yet, post them in this thread: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26297

Thx
Mike

Too bad I returned my card yesterday - I wanted to do more tests!



seems so


http://guru3d.com/article/Videocards/443/1/

So if you are about to build a HTPC at this moment in time; the final recommendation goes to one card and one card only: The AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT. It offers by far the best HD acceleration and image quality to date, and not only that; you can pick one up for 99 USD as well.


http://techreport.com/reviews/2007q3/radeon-hd-2400-2600/index.x?pg=11

The Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 offer the best overall combination of CPU offloading, power efficiency, and image quality available.


best

m

BTW, does the 2400XT have any more effective oomph for 1080i mpeg2 decoding than the 2400pro, or is the 2600 really what you want for that?

Also, have people found the MPEG2 decoding performance of the 2400PRO better under Vista or XP?

Thanks,
Mike

Autoboy, since you seem to be running SageTV fine under Vista with this card and getting amazing playback, can you outline the specific parameters you are using for Sage in terms of driver, codec, settings etc...? Or better yet, post them in this thread: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26297

Thx
Mike

Mike,

I'm running XP. Actually MCE with MC disabled. I already posted my setup in the help forums for people to help me with the mkv problem. I should probably check on that thread I started. Would you like me to still post it in your thread?

Out of curiosity, why do you use the SageTV player? I use beyondTV for recording ATSC HD streams. For playback, I use whatever player (WMP, VLC, Nero whatever) is handy on the PC I am at to play the .tp streams. Just curious.

I use the sage player because it's integration with the recorded content is much better than simply trying to find the files on my 4 recording drives and playing them with an external player. The Sage player used to have serious problems but they moved to mplayer and things are working better. I like sage because it is so customizable, and supports all the features I want like clients and server setup with drive spanning, plus I use a hauppage MVP for a slim client. They are also coming out with a HD extender that should handle pretty much any content natively.

I'm planning on replacing my bedroom HTPC with the HD extender and maybe eventually my HT client that I'm running the 2400pro in. Still, my TV can't do the awesome deinterlacing and scaling that this 2400pro can do so I would lose that. I might be in the market for an external scaler if that happened

I have never used Beyond TV and I'm really not too interested in switching now. I am very familar with sage now and it is stable enough for my GF. If I have content that it can't play well, like the mkv files, I can always use other players. They are not GF friendly though.

BTW, does the 2400XT have any more effective oomph for 1080i mpeg2 decoding than the 2400pro, or is the 2600 really what you want for that?

Also, have people found the MPEG2 decoding performance of the 2400PRO better under Vista or XP?

Thanks,
Mike

There is nobody running a 2400xt on this forum that is active. Seems the onlyt active members are the 2400pro folks...which might indicate that they don't have any problems with their cards like the 2400pro folks.

Can't really comment on the Vista/XP debate Seems pretty similar to me

I use the sage player because it's integration with the recorded content is much better than simply trying to find the files on my 4 recording drives and playing them with an external player. The Sage player used to have serious problems but they moved to mplayer and things are working better. I like sage because it is so customizable, and supports all the features I want like clients and server setup with drive spanning, plus I use a hauppage MVP for a slim client. They are also coming out with a HD extender that should handle pretty much any content natively.

I'm planning on replacing my bedroom HTPC with the HD extender and maybe eventually my HT client that I'm running the 2400pro in. Still, my TV can't do the awesome deinterlacing and scaling that this 2400pro can do so I would lose that. I might be in the market for an external scaler if that happened

I have never used Beyond TV and I'm really not too interested in switching now. I am very familar with sage now and it is stable enough for my GF. If I have content that it can't play well, like the mkv files, I can always use other players. They are not GF friendly though.

Thanks,
I'm not trying to sell you BeyondTV: I don't use the BeyondTV player and was curious why you were using the SageTV player. You satisfied my curiosity: I can understand why.

What's GF?

adding confusion to the mix.... is a 2600pro enough off a step up from the 2400 pro to handle everything HD wise or do you need to spend the extra coin and get the XT. The 2600 pro can be had for a little bit more than the 2400 pro (a little bit being a relative phrase :)b

There is nobody running a 2400xt on this forum that is active. Seems the onlyt active members are the 2400pro folks...which might indicate that they don't have any problems with their cards like the 2400pro folks.




Still only one 2400XT owner in the poll, just like yesterday. Newegg has only had them for a couple of days....

GF = girlfriend

adding confusion to the mix.... is a 2600pro enough off a step up from the 2400 pro to handle everything HD wise or do you need to spend the extra coin and get the XT. The 2600 pro can be had for a little bit more than the 2400 pro (a little bit being a relative phrase b

Still not enough information to say for sure that the 2600pro can handle everything except that the 2600pro and 2600xt have the same regisrty settings for decoding HD and don't appear to limit any HD decoding like the drivers for the 2400pro and xt. There are no 2600pro users here either. I would say it is fairly safe to assume they work fine based on some reviewers indicating they score a perfect 100 in the HD HQV test.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2007q3/radeon-hd-2400-2600/index.x?pg=11

BTW, does the 2400XT have any more effective oomph for 1080i mpeg2 decoding than the 2400pro, or is the 2600 really what you want for that?

Also, have people found the MPEG2 decoding performance of the 2400PRO better under Vista or XP?


I'm going to get a 2400xt next week, the 2400pro can't handle my dual displays (want to use the PC while others watch DVD/TV, it's just a bit too much for it), and it's really a bit too close to maxxing out on 1080i video material. Given that overclocking the memory from 400>480 on the 2400pro makes a pretty big difference on 1080i GPU usage (96>84%), the 2400xt's 700mhz ram should help things quite a lot.

Since the prices are near enough the same, and the fact both are fanless, the 2400xt looks a much better buy - you even get the HDMI dongle with it.

The problem with European 1080i50 h264 is the DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264 key. It defaults to 1 with the 2400, and you get the problem you describe above. Like NVidia, ATI seem unaware that a world exists outside North America.

Do this for xp:

1) start menu, run, regedit
2) edit/find DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264
3) change it to 0
4) close, and reboot (not sure it's needed, but do it anyway).


For Vista the same, but the reboot isn't needed.

I tried this, but Cpu is between 60- 75 % , so HA does not work. In the decoder I putted it on!

Hey guys - why is there no 512MB 2600XT card? There are 512MB 2600Pro cards? Should I go with the extra memory or the extra theoretical horse power?

autoboy - deinterlacing is nice - but for blu-ray and hd-dvds currently released hardware interlacing right now is hardly needed.

For broadcast HD, yes it is important - although the DScaler5 w/IVTC mod does a good job in software mode.

Video quality was the reason why I bought the ATI card - but the bugs and BSODs and the pain of getting the thing working trumps everything else!

Also, PQ takes a nosedive when those strange purple/green lines show up when using PowerDVD. The card is at 50C when it happens. Possibly faulty hardware design? (Not enough voltage?)

When the 2600s come out I may give this a go again - even arfster is thinking of replacing the 2400 with a more powerful card for the hardware deinterlacing. :)

Max,

I didn't know you were running the DScaler5 w/IVTC. I haven't tried it myself. I probably don't have enough horsepower for that. You will be running overlay then? I don't have much understanding of overlay.

As for the 2400pro, I too am considering an upgrade but for now it appears to be working for me. I'm a low power computer guy and I'm a big fan of doing more with less and that is what draws me to the 2400pro. Otherwise I would have gone for the 2600pro or xt. It seems the xt is quieter than the fanned 2600pro too.

I just wish I could find one at a retail store. Anyone know where I can find one in Palo Alto, CA? If I ordered it online I wouldn't really get a chance to play with it for a long time. This weekend I am free.

Ok, here's something _very_ useful for Vista 2400pro users. Building a new HTPC setup, I've installed Vista, PDVD (+ 3104 update), Haali, and the latest Vista Catalyst hotfix drivers. The result is _much_ lower GPU %s. Of the standard clips I mentioned above, the "difficult" 1080i MPEG2 clip dropped from 96% to 65.

The reason is no Aero. Vista looked at the graphics card and figured it wasn't fast enough, whereas on my other system it was already turned on. Switch it on, and the same clip is back up at 96%.

Wow, Vista looked at the card and thought it was not fast enough for Aero? Even my mom's 6150LE has aero turned on by default.

Does Vista w/o aero use DxVA1?

Max,

I just wish I could find one at a retail store. Anyone know where I can find one in Palo Alto, CA? If I ordered it online I wouldn't really get a chance to play with it for a long time. This weekend I am free.

I looked around too, the only place I could find was Central Computer - they have the asus 256MB 2600Pro. Beware they have a 15% restocking fee.

Well, the evaluation is done during OS installation, with whatever default drivers Vista has. Quite possible they have nothing vaguely suitable for the 2000 series :-)

I dunno quite why Aero should have such a hit during fullscreen playback though. It's not a DXVA 1/2 thing - Vista is native DXVA2. It can work with old-style DXVA1 decoders by translating the calls in realtime, but that has an overhead on gpu use (and a nasty one too). Doesn't matter here though, I was using EVR and a DXVA2 mpeg2 decoder (cyberlink's).

Noticed another thing: powerdvd has less of a gpu hit than WMP, despite using the same renderer and decoder. It drops it from 65 to 56% or so on a 1080p screen. With an 18mbit 1080i50 h264 film, it's around 27%.

Looks like the 2400pro has the grunt for pretty much everything after all, as long as you:

1) don't use aero
2) don't play 1080i on 2500*1600 screens
3) apply reghacks :-)

... Even though the 2400PRO comes with that NTSC/PAL jumper set to PAL.

I was wondering about this, when I got the card, I changed it from pal to ntsc (assuming the label is correct). Does anyone know if this is necessary, or has someone had it set wrong? what was the result?

p.

Mike,

I'm running XP. Actually MCE with MC disabled. I already posted my setup in the help forums for people to help me with the mkv problem. I should probably check on that thread I started. Would you like me to still post it in your thread?



I use the sage player because it's integration with the recorded content is much better than simply trying to find the files on my 4 recording drives and playing them with an external player. The Sage player used to have serious problems but they moved to mplayer and things are working better. I like sage because it is so customizable, and supports all the features I want like clients and server setup with drive spanning, plus I use a hauppage MVP for a slim client. They are also coming out with a HD extender that should handle pretty much any content natively.

I'm planning on replacing my bedroom HTPC with the HD extender and maybe eventually my HT client that I'm running the 2400pro in. Still, my TV can't do the awesome deinterlacing and scaling that this 2400pro can do so I would lose that. I might be in the market for an external scaler if that happened

I have never used Beyond TV and I'm really not too interested in switching now. I am very familar with sage now and it is stable enough for my GF. If I have content that it can't play well, like the mkv files, I can always use other players. They are not GF friendly though.

It would be great if you could post your config in the thread - it's pretty hard sorting through all the threads of complaints about stuff not working, esp. for first time builders.

Thanks!
Mike

All,

before I purchase one of these cards can anyone say if a P4 2.4Ghz CPU will be capable of running a HD-DVD or Bluray disc with one of these cards installed? Anyone out there tested on a system like this....or do I need a complete overhaul?

Thanks!

In theory, I think you should be ok, if all decoding happens on the GPU, which seems to be a bit questionable... some formats do get fully decoded (h.264/AVC, VC-1?), some don't, but should be (mpeg-2) or can be forced though registry changes.

People are getting different results, based on the playback app, and the filters the app chooses.

Anyone out there running a P4 2.4 that can answer?

p.

I'm going to get a 2400xt next week, the 2400pro can't handle my dual displays (want to use the PC while others watch DVD/TV, it's just a bit too much for it), and it's really a bit too close to maxxing out on 1080i video material. Given that overclocking the memory from 400>480 on the 2400pro makes a pretty big difference on 1080i GPU usage (96>84%), the 2400xt's 700mhz ram should help things quite a lot.

Since the prices are near enough the same, and the fact both are fanless, the 2400xt looks a much better buy - you even get the HDMI dongle with it.

The issue for me is that I have a low profile system, and there aren't any 2600 based LP cards out there, esp. fanless, whereas there are several lp 2400pro systems. If turning off aero pays so well, that would be great news.

This system is a dedicated sage client (it's a Dell C521 compact system, with a 3600 X2, 1 GB of ram, 160GB HD I got for$213 on sale 3 weeks ago), so it's not that much more expensive than a media extender. Of course, the 2400pro will increase the cost of the system dramtically. :-) It came with Vista and all the drivers work great, so while I could strip off Vista and install XP, if I can get great HD performance and Vista (which has some nice power management stuff for me), that's great.

If it works well, I'll replace my nvidia 7950GT in my main HTPC client too.

Thanks,
Mike

Well, the evaluation is done during OS installation, with whatever default drivers Vista has. Quite possible they have nothing vaguely suitable for the 2000 series :-)

I dunno quite why Aero should have such a hit during fullscreen playback though. It's not a DXVA 1/2 thing - Vista is native DXVA2. It can work with old-style DXVA1 decoders by translating the calls in realtime, but that has an overhead on gpu use (and a nasty one too). Doesn't matter here though, I was using EVR and a DXVA2 mpeg2 decoder (cyberlink's).

Noticed another thing: powerdvd has less of a gpu hit than WMP, despite using the same renderer and decoder. It drops it from 65 to 56% or so on a 1080p screen. With an 18mbit 1080i50 h264 film, it's around 27%.

Looks like the 2400pro has the grunt for pretty much everything after all, as long as you:

1) don't use aero
2) don't play 1080i on 2500*1600 screens
3) apply reghacks :-)

Here in Vista x86 every time I start PowerDVD 7.3 Aero gets disabled, and when I close it it gets enabled again. The first time it happened Vista told me that the program couldn't use Aero so it will be temporarily deactivated. The same happens when I open videos with Media Player Classic, with Overlay (not with VMR9 though). So it shouldn't make a difference in my case. And I'm also wondering why has this happened to me but apparently not to others.

Also I wanted to ask you, have you found out what exactly these two fixes (the driver hotfix and PDVD 3104) do? The driver hotfix just makes opening any videos in any of the three PDVD 7.3 versions (standard, 2911 and 3104) VERY slow. Going back to vanilla 7.6 goes back to normal for opening speed. This happens with all videos I've tried, regular DVDs, HD-DVDs, Avi Xvids, ripped HD-DVDs.

And PDVD 3104 just screws my HD-DVD playback. I can't get it to display full-screen in an 1080p display, or get the window bigger than a certain size, as was explained by me and others in the PDVD thread.


EDIT: It's weird, but the driver hotfix makes PDVD open slowly in my 1920x1200 LCD via DVI, but not in the Sharp 1080p that I tried it on yesterday. If anything, in the Sharp it was faster! I'll try again tonight though. The Sharp Aquos 52" 1080p is not mine, damn!

Same for me: Can't view fullscreen and the window can only be resized to a certain size! I've tried it on two diffrenet systems of which one i installed from the ground. Same effect as "andy o" describes!

I'm using a 2400Pro and i tried it with hardware accelartion on and off, used different resolutions, buth nothing helped. After uninstalling powerdvd and just installing version 2911 everything is fine again...

What's going on here?

:D Central Computer is 3 min from my office. I'm on my way.

Edit: Nope, they are only available in Santa Clara and they have 2. I live nearby that store but I don't think I will be able to make it down there tonight. I already have plans.

Nice to know there is a place nearby that sells this stuff though. I get tired of the open boxes at Frys. Sometimes I just like to get my hands on something instead of ordering it online. It is worth the extra few bucks I pay over online stores.

Hey guys - why is there no 512MB 2600XT card? There are 512MB 2600Pro cards? Should I go with the extra memory or the extra theoretical horse power?

Amazon has at least one. I tried to post the link, but each time it would not work.

(Edit)

They have 2 of them. One is a HIS brand and the other is a Diamond Viper.

the 2400pro will increase the cost of the system dramtically. :-)

Haha, that is one cheap system if a 2400pro breaks your budget. I wish I had found that deal. I just picked up the HP version of that for $450 except I got a X2 4100+. I gave it to my mom and she loves the compact case.

I'm confused...

I just got my 2400Pro.... I'm using Catalyst 7.6 in the Advanced Settings.

I am using the 1280 x 720 60Hz setting and I have this 3" black border around my image. How do I remove it? I've looked around in the Catalyst control center but I dont see any settings that allow me to repair the "underscan"....

Any thoughts?

Oh. I'm running XP Pro... I didn't even install this for Vista yet.

The issue for me is that I have a low profile system, and there aren't any 2600 based LP cards out there, esp. fanless, whereas there are several lp 2400pro systems. If turning off aero pays so well, that would be great news.

It looks like it does - I don't see any material it can't play at 1080p output resolution. Maybe it might struggle with interlaced 25mbit HDDVDs, not sure. Having said that, the card is strangely more efficient with avc than mpeg2, as if they'd taken more time to get it right because mpeg2 is so easy :-)

It looks like it does - I don't see any material it can't play at 1080p output resolution. Maybe it might struggle with interlaced 25mbit HDDVDs, not sure. Having said that, the card is strangely more efficient with avc than mpeg2, as if they'd taken more time to get it right because mpeg2 is so easy :-)

What are you playing the MPEG2 content in? Sage, MCE etc? You're using the cyberlink codec I assume...

Thanks,
mike

MPC and PowerDVD, both using EVR (VMR9 eats GPU resources ridiculously in Vista) and the cyberlink codecs. With the new install I'll probably only use those, haali and ffdshow for everything - that covers pretty much everything now.

MPC and PowerDVD, both using EVR (VMR9 eats GPU resources ridiculously in Vista) and the cyberlink codecs. With the new install I'll probably only use those, haali and ffdshow for everything - that covers pretty much everything now.

Hmmm, Sage doesn't use EVR, so I wonder if there is that big a speedup in Sage with AERO off. Though if the cyberlink codec is using it maybe it doesn't matter. Autoboy, are you using VMR9 in your settings or overlay? Sage doesn't do EVR, so I'm curious about the settings.

Thanks,
mike

Max,

Currently the ATI HD2400 and HD2600 are the only video cards that can do advanced deinterlacing (more than just a bob or weave) on HD media. This includes mpeg2, vc-1, and h264. The quality of interlaced HD with these cards is amazing once you get it working.

Most of us here are concerned with hardware acceleration because without hardware acceleration enabled, all we get is simple software HD deinterlacing like your 7900GT does. We are much more concerned with video quality than CPU use. The low CPU use is just a nice perk and indicates that our hardware deinterlacing is working. However, low cpu use is great for me since I use a single core athlon, but is not really my main concern.

If you are happy with your 7900gt then you should stick with it. But you should know that eventually you are going to want the hardware deinterlacing for HD. It seems Nvidia is working on enabling this feature, but so far only the 8X00 series cards with purevideo 2 are capable of it. Also, and i am speaking from memory of a rumor, that the 8600GTS is the only Nvidia card that could handle hardware HD deinterlacing with beta drivers.

It is amazing that the 2400pro can handle HD deinterlacing (with registry hacks). I am in awe of this card and I'm hoping the support will only improve. It will probably turn out that the 2400pro is not capable of HD deinterlacing for all 1080i material, but I tested all my HD on my server and GPU never creeped aboove 95% and averaged 45% for 720p, and 85% for 1080i at 585/500. Cpu was 15-35% on a 3200+. So far for me, it has enough power for anything I throw at it. Also, so far h264 has worked great and allows me to play HD media. MKVs give me a little trouble because sagetv will not accelerate them, but other players work fine.

So, if you want HD hardware deinterlacing, right now only the 2400 and 2600 can offer that. Max, I'll see you back in this forum soon as we work out the issues.

What on earth makes you think nVidia cards are incapable on deinterlacing 1080i in hardware?
1080i Mpeg2 deinterlacing is vital to me, as it constitutes the majority of my HD viewing. My old 7800GTS had very good deinterlacing performance for true interlaced 1080i content and my 8800 is simply faultless. SD deinterlacing is also staggeringly good and a huge improvement over my 7800.
The nVidia cards need VMR9 full screen renderless mode for smooth playback of true interlaced 1080i and YUV mixing must be disabled or bob deinterlacing results.

I was going to get a 2600XT with DDR4 to test, but until the HD video level expansion problem is resolved I will hold off.

I am very interested in feedback form 2900 owners about video quality and how it compares to the 2600 or nVidia 8xxx cards, in fact I started a thread on that very issue, but unfortunately feedback has been sadly lacking.

What on earth makes you think nVidia cards are incapable on deinterlacing 1080i in hardware?
1080i Mpeg2 deinterlacing is vital to me, as it constitutes the majority of my HD viewing. My old 7800GTS had very good deinterlacing performance for true interlaced 1080i content and my 8800 is simply faultless. SD deinterlacing is also staggeringly good and a huge improvement over my 7800.
The nVidia cards need VMR9 full screen renderless mode for smooth playback of true interlaced 1080i and YUV mixing must be disabled or bob deinterlacing results.

I was going to get a 2600XT with DDR4 to test, but until the HD video level expansion problem is resolved I will hold off.

I am very interested in feedback form 2900 owners about video quality and how it compares to the 2600 or nVidia 8xxx cards, in fact I started a thread on that very issue, but unfortunately feedback has been sadly lacking.

I'm basing this on the fact that every 7 series card has failed every HD HQV benchmark and the 8 series scores only 20-30 points without beta drivers. I've been told that 1080i hardware deinterlacing does not work on nvidia cards from published interviews with nvidia engineers...wish I could find them...

The nvidia cards are doing a simple bob and weave as far as I know. For lots of content this can look great. For a long time my 7300LE looked great with HD. Now that I have seen what the 2400pro can do, the difference is big.

Mike, I'm using VMR9 in Sage. I should have indicated that in the sage forum. Hardware accel does not work in overlay.

Edit: Hmmm, as I think about this the HD HQV benchmark is in VC-1 so the Nvidia cards are not doing hardware deinterlacing on VC-1 material.

This does not mean they can't do mpeg2 HD deinterlacing with IVTC and 3:2 pulldown. So, really the only advantage the ATI cards have is on non mpeg2 content. Crap, sorry, i gotta go change my posts.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing everything you read on the net.
The HQV test is of limited value at the best of times and when it is conducted by people with little experience with video playback on a PC, with software and setup that is not optimal, it is completely invalid.
I view a 70” 1080 display from 9 feet and can see every line in a 1920x1080 test pattern. If deinterlacing is less the best it’s quite obvious, and bob deinterlacing is plain to see.
1080i deinterlacing test video confirms that simple bob/weave is NOT occurring, so you are misinformed.

Your old 7300LE was way underpowered for 1080i deinterlacing. Even my old 6600GT was not up to the task and it was much more powerful then your 7300LE.
I never saw good deinterlacing until I moved up to a 7800GTS, and the 8800 is significantly better again. The 8800 is also a huge improvement in video quality over the 7800.


EDIT:
Just saw you modified post.
The latest version of CoreAVC has working hardware deinterlacing on my 8800 for h.264. The only 1080i VC1 content I have is film sourced, so I cant test deinterlacing.

Same for me: Can't view fullscreen and the window can only be resized to a certain size! I've tried it on two diffrenet systems of which one i installed from the ground. Same effect as "andy o" describes!

I'm using a 2400Pro and i tried it with hardware accelartion on and off, used different resolutions, buth nothing helped. After uninstalling powerdvd and just installing version 2911 everything is fine again...

What's going on here?

Yes same here.

But, there is nothing I can't play without that lasted patch for the moment! So reinstal the latest version without the patch. if you got the latest canal HDDVD, then just load another HDDVD that works and then the canal title.

Only problem I am having is after doing all these changes, Pwdvd, will NOT play normal, this means without green flashes and pixelation, in 47.95!

Has anybody, that did the registermanipulation, a way to play at 1080 p and 47.95 hz?

Edit: Hmmm, as I think about this the HD HQV benchmark is in VC-1 so the Nvidia cards are not doing hardware deinterlacing on VC-1 material.


Yup, or h264. This is the major improvement with the ATI cards for me - the picture is quite a bit sharper with 1080i50 interlaced stuff. Pity it's ruined by the colour expansion of course.

Yeah, don't believe what some guy with 25 posts on AVS forum says either. I kinda feel like the guy on the audio forum who says Bose is the best sound he has ever heard.

I checked it out and the 7600GT and up can support hardware deinterlacing for mpeg2. IVTC and bad edit are supported. THis is my mistake and should be noted.

I saw some arifacts today that I have never seen before. There was a small white pattern that showed up in the borders of Man vs Wild show. On my TV I don't do any expansions so I have borders on the sides for normal 4:3 TV and then the show is letterboxed so there is black all around. The picture still sucks and sucks more if you zoom so I leave it. Anyways, I don't know what those patterns are, they appeared 2-3 times in 2 hours. Pretty regular mathematical pattern??? I also have one recording that has a green blocky mess in the middle of the screen. It seems there are still some driver issues and I hope this is all worked out because I'm really liking nice HD deinterlacing on the rest of the programs.

Yes, the 7300LE was a very weak card. I got it as a stopgap when I switched from AGP and a 9600xt to PCI-e. I was waiting on the new Nvidia and ATI cards. I could not turn on IVTC on the card because it was a slideshow for HD content. SD looked fine but since I didn't want to turn it on and off depending on the content I just left it off. I am much happier now with the 2400pro and that it works for HD and SD content.

I also see some color problems but I've never calibrated my display so I can't comment with authority on this problem. It seems minor to me and I only saw it on a single program. My girlfriend was watching Sunset Tan and a little 8 year old girl spent $1300 on her tan for school pictures. It looked downright awful and I'm praying that was the color expansion you talk about because nobody could ever want to look like that!

indieke2, you ever try the new 2 buck chuck chardonay? It won a double gold medal at the California State Fair in a blind comparison. It actually won the competition!!!! Tried some tonight. Figured I would buy a case without ever trying it. It is cheaper for a case than some of my single bottles. This stuff is awesome. A little buttery at first settling into a nice crisp aftertaste. No real oaky flavors. Anyways, gotta go wake up my pretty girl. I think she had too much.

Autoboy, that is nice in the States, you can find GOOD two bucks wines! Here i France I have some American Chardonnay, cycle, but it is more then two bucks! :eek:

And I can find, here is very good stuff for 8-10 $, so my wine budget is high!

To come back to this card, I am a bit fed up! I bought this to have a fluent image. Yes my CpU is much better, but what can I do with that, if I got blocking and green flaches that makes 47.95 un watchable.

I set everything back like before, but can't make it work anymore, when it did without the repare of Mpeg 2 acceleration. Anyway, this is a pitty, I preffer the crisp image of Ati, then the more dull Nvidia one. But I can't believe, that they bring out a card, where the drivers are bad, that is made for HD, but no native support for 48 hz (don't they know that some projectors accept that rr instead of 24?).

It's fine to try a sollution yourself, but I am afraid, that if ever we got a stable driver, we have to change all our settings again. I am a bit angry..... :(

hheee mon cher
je vais passer mes vacances en Aout tout autour de Cahors /Angouleme
Si c`est pas loin de toi on peut arranger un "deal"

HD 2400/2600 installation/ configuration >>> degustation-vin libre :D :D :D

Hey people, just to let you know...

It seems HIS might be coming out with a 2600 pro (and a 2600 XT too!) with a smaller version (2 heatpipes instead of 3) of the Zalman VNF100 heatpipe fanless cooler. No picture yet though, but this seems like an ideal card for a more powerful HTPC. Crossing my fingers here, this will make me keep the 2400pro for a longer time until this comes out, I guess.

http://www.hisdigital.com/html/product_ov.php?id=320&view=yes

hheee mon cher
je vais passer mes vacances en Aout tout autour de Cahors /Angouleme
Si c`est pas loin de toi on peut arranger un "deal"

HD 2400/2600 installation/ configuration >>> degustation-vin libre :D :D :D

Would have been a good idea and you are welcome! But I live in Var, that is South-East France, 40 minutes from the coast, Draguignan, a stroll from St Tropez....

I also see some color problems but I've never calibrated my display so I can't comment with authority on this problem. It seems minor to me and I only saw it on a single program. My girlfriend was watching Sunset Tan and a little 8 year old girl spent $1300 on her tan for school pictures. It looked downright awful and I'm praying that was the color expansion you talk about because nobody could ever want to look like that!


The term “color expansion” is not accurate, color is not affected. What is happening with HD content is video level expansion where the RGB video levels (nominally 16-235) are expanded or rescaled to PC levels (0-255). 219 steps in brightness for each primary colour have to be interpolated into 256 steps. (scaling for brightness)
The result is a dramatic change in image contrast, which some people will find appealing initially and mistake for added sharpness. The down side is black crush (lack of shadow detail) and white clipping (blown out highlights).
If the display was previously calibrated for video levels (16-235) on an nVidia card, swapping to a new video card (ATI) that expands to PC levels will look very different. The ATI image will have more contrast and “pop” at the expense of shadow detail and accuracy.
The display must be recalibrated to suit PC levels with the ATI card, but since levels for SD video are not expanded, the display must be recalibrated every time there is a change from SD video to HD video, which is a real PITA and unacceptable.

Expanding video levels also increases the likelihood of Posterization or false contouring, although if it is done well it may not be a problem. That is why 8 bit video should be processed in 10 bit or more internally in the video card and display, so as to avoid rounding errors in level manipulation.
Adjusting contrast or brightness in the drivers or player application also result in level manipulation and should in theory be avoided if possible.


I preffer the crisp image of Ati, then the more dull Nvidia one. (

The “crisp image” you see on the ATI will almost certainly be due to video level expansion as explained above, assuming you have disabled sharpening in the registry.
You can achieve the same effect on the nVidia cards by turning the contrast up and the brightness down.
Video levels expansion is a fault, but that does not mean some people won’t like it.

In theory, I think you should be ok, if all decoding happens on the GPU, which seems to be a bit questionable... some formats do get fully decoded (h.264/AVC, VC-1?), some don't, but should be (mpeg-2) or can be forced though registry changes.

People are getting different results, based on the playback app, and the filters the app chooses.

Anyone out there running a P4 2.4 that can answer?

p.

Thanks for the response. Since posting I've checked my system and its a P4 2.8 (if that makes any difference?). Anyone out there tested these cards with a similar low spec (by today's standards) system?

Thanks!

Well, the evaluation is done during OS installation, with whatever default drivers Vista has. Quite possible they have nothing vaguely suitable for the 2000 series :-)

I dunno quite why Aero should have such a hit during fullscreen playback though. It's not a DXVA 1/2 thing - Vista is native DXVA2. It can work with old-style DXVA1 decoders by translating the calls in realtime, but that has an overhead on gpu use (and a nasty one too). Doesn't matter here though, I was using EVR and a DXVA2 mpeg2 decoder (cyberlink's).

I had the same issue.....It rated my video performance a "1" and disabled Aero during the install.....after updating to the latest drivers my video performance jumped to 3.2

By desinstalling the lates Powerdvd Patch, everything is normal except 48 Hz playback, that I have to skip for a while.

I put the H 264, 24 fps only, to 0, but the HW acceleration doesn't seem to work.

It does work on Mpeg 2, although i do not seem to find a combination of filter, That the Nvidia is happy with. I have a white line under the movie still with Gabest....

This doesn't mean that everything else is running smoothly, got some smaller isssues, here and threre.

Ive got a Powercolor 2600xt gddr4 card arriving on Monday. Gonna use it in my quad core HTPC running vista.

I also have a Yamaha RXV-1700 receiver with hdmi conntected to my LG 42" monitor (1360x768).

If i connected the 2600xt to my receiver will it pass 1360x768 (768p) to my monitor, or will it only do 1280x720 (720p)?

Also I dont want to use the built in audio future in the 2600xt (dosent pass 5 channel pcm so its worthless to me). Gonna use 6 cables from my sound card into multi channel in on the receiver instead. Do I just disable the ati sound card then or?

thanks in advance. BTW you have noticed the powerdvd 7.3 ultra patch 3104a on the cyberlink site? Does it work fine with the 2600xt?

Any chance you could pass along a clip of it? It sounds to me like you are running into the powerdvd 20fps bug, if you can check the renderer in the graph you should see no dropped frames yet only a steady 20 fps output if so. the fact nothing is loaded is a sign it's a decoder/driver/setting issue and not a fault of the card itself in my opinion :D

Perhaps you are right. I reinstalled the drivers and the problem with dropping frames on the "Alive in Seattle" high bitrate AVC 1080i HD DVD seems to be gone. I had applied the registry changes arfster recommended before, the reinstall wiped them out. I re-aded the DXVA-enabling key thing, but it did not seem to affect the playback of this particular HD DVD disc.
I noticed something even stranger now with the playback of this disc, though. The CPU (yes the CPU, not the GPU) is now up to 60%. No dropped frames (same as with 8500GT), but instead of 12-20% the CPU is high. The "Use Hardware accelleration" checkbox in PDVD is ticked and the configuration info indicated it was using it. I thought it was doing software decoding, but with full SW decoding CPU is 75-80%, while now it was more like 45-60%. I'm really puzzled, 8500GT has 12-20% on this material, and the 2400Pro has the same (12-20) CPU usage with progressive AVC blu-rays.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing everything you read on the net.
The HQV test is of limited value at the best of times and when it is conducted by people with little experience with video playback on a PC, with software and setup that is not optimal, it is completely invalid.
I view a 70” 1080 display from 9 feet and can see every line in a 1920x1080 test pattern. If deinterlacing is less the best it’s quite obvious, and bob deinterlacing is plain to see.
1080i deinterlacing test video confirms that simple bob/weave is NOT occurring, so you are misinformed.

Your old 7300LE was way underpowered for 1080i deinterlacing. Even my old 6600GT was not up to the task and it was much more powerful then your 7300LE.
I never saw good deinterlacing until I moved up to a 7800GTS, and the 8800 is significantly better again. The 8800 is also a huge improvement in video quality over the 7800.


EDIT:
Just saw you modified post.
The latest version of CoreAVC has working hardware deinterlacing on my 8800 for h.264. The only 1080i VC1 content I have is film sourced, so I cant test deinterlacing.




Yes Owen , you have your own thread ATI vs. NVidia and there you are singing on 145 pages
the hymn of your unbeatable 8800 Nvidia graphiccard. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

A card I wouldn`t accept in my HTPC even if you send it to me for free with 10 bottle of Chateau Lafite 1993 included... and I told you in this thread why I wouldn´t ...


And so wouldn`t it be nice , if you come back into the ATI 2xx thread after you have tested an ATI yourself and not hijacking this thread to sing again ?

I would suggest take the cheapest one.. an HD 2400 for 50 $ , it was clearly better than my 8600 GTS i.

We have four new reviews now , where the reviewers (not only) prefer the picturequality of the 2xxx ATI cards over the 8xxxx series (like me) and its of limited value if you repeat and repeat again
that all these people are idiots and their setup is invalid...

I am really a bit tired ...

I noticed something even stranger now with the playback of this disc, though. The CPU (yes the CPU, not the GPU) is now up to 60%. No dropped frames (same as with 8500GT), but instead of 12-20% the CPU is high. The "Use Hardware accelleration" checkbox in PDVD is ticked and the configuration info indicated it was using it. I thought it was doing software decoding, but with full SW decoding CPU is 75-80%, while now it was more like 45-60%. I'm really puzzled, 8500GT has 12-20% on this material, and the 2400Pro has the same (12-20) CPU usage with progressive AVC blu-rays.

That's what I get with broadcast 1080i50 if dxva24fpsh264 (or whatever it's called) is set to 1, as it is by default. PDVD says it's accelerating, but it only lowers CPU a little - looks like it's doinh the deinterlacing on the card, but not any acceleration.

Sorry for not reading the whole thread but maybe one of you can give me a quick answer:

Do the 24xx 25xx 26xx generation of cards offer the same full video decoding capabilities that the 85xx 86xx cards do? That means

-decoding of high bitrate VC-1/AVC streams (including deblocking!!!) on a single core CPU system

-high quality spatial/temporal deinterlacing

-high quality scaling

-no random field order problems when deinterlacing

And if yes, do they do this on XP or only on Vista (as is the case for Nvidia)?

Thx.

Being I am rebuilding my HTPC I will be getting a new version of Windows. Which version works the best with these cards?

Sorry for not reading the whole thread but maybe one of you can give me a quick answer:

Do the 24xx 25xx 26xx generation of cards offer the same full video decoding capabilities that the 85xx 86xx cards do? That means

-decoding of high bitrate VC-1/AVC streams (including deblocking!!!) on a single core CPU system

-high quality spatial/temporal deinterlacing

-high quality scaling

-no random field order problems when deinterlacing

And if yes, do they do this on XP or only on Vista (as is the case for Nvidia)?

Thx.

Hmm, this post if flame bait if I have ever seen it.
The answer is pretty caveated (though you have asked most of the relevent questions). Short answer is yes but I would not go out and buy it yet. This is a great thread to get the info you need on this card. Also there are some pretty good reviews as well particularily concerning the deinterlacing. Maybe someone with a little bit more time can answer in detail all your questions but I would strongly encourage you to spend some time with this thread.
Have fun.

Hmm, this post if flame bait if I have ever seen it.
The answer is pretty caveated (though you have asked most of the relevent questions). Short answer is yes but I would not go out and buy it yet. This is a great thread to get the info you need on this card. Also there are some pretty good reviews as well particularily concerning the deinterlacing. Maybe someone with a little bit more time can answer in detail all your questions but I would strongly encourage you to spend some time with this thread.
Have fun.

Well if you say the answers are all in this thread I guess I'll go through it tomorrow.

But I'm honestly curious as to why you think my post was flame bait? Who was I flaming? ATI or Nvidia? Quite frankly I think both have a terrible reputation with regards to video decoding.

-decoding of high bitrate VC-1/AVC streams (including deblocking!!!) on a single core CPU system

ATI offers much more offload for VC1 - they basically take VC1 cpu load down to the near-zero range, the same degree of offload as with h264. The 8500/8600 only approx half the VC1 CPU hit.

If you have a slower single core, this means the difference between framedrop and smooth jitterfree. If you have a dualcore, it really doesn't matter - eg on a 2ghz core2 duo, you can expect to see around 15% to 25% playing a VC1 disc, but on a 2ghz athlon the peaks will touch 100%. I'm not sure quite how slow a single core you could use with these, maybe a 2.5ghz single core AMD?

Both deblock in hardware mode, and are the only cards that can do this in hardware mode for h264 afaik. This only really matters for low bitrate stuff.


-high quality spatial/temporal deinterlacing


Yes, both are really impressive at this. The ATI models are better for h264 deinterlacing, others can comment on mpeg2 (probably the same).


-high quality scaling


Yes, all excellent. I'm doing a comparison atm, will post some screenshots of DVD upscaling.


-no random field order problems when deinterlacing


Not that I've ever noticed.



And if yes, do they do this on XP or only on Vista (as is the case for Nvidia)?


The XP NVidia drivers are riddled with bugs for h264 acceleration on the 8500/8600. From the small number of comments, so it seems are the ATI ones. Only used Vista myself, and they work fine.

The ATIs are in some ways the better cards, but many of the improvements above only benefit a small number of people (and HDMI audio doesn't seem to work at all!). However, there's the big caveat that they do a forced TV>PC levels expansion for HD stuff. They'll surely fix it soon, but at present it's really irritating, and it makes the 8500/8600 currently the better kit for image quality.

Note that if you go the ATI route, you should probably skip the 2400pro if you use Vista Aero and play 1080i mpeg2, or output to a 2500*1600 display. The combination is just too much for the poor thing, but anything less is fine. The 2400xt is much faster for minimal extra cost, and is also available fanless.

Excellent response, thanks.

It is important for me to have full acceleration because I am determined to use low power kit, I have Pentium M's all over the house and this rig only is single core 1.73ghz. I can now play everything with acceleration in conjuction with the latest Power DVD at 1280x1024 (test LCD) all with only 70 watts power draw at the wall. My Core2duo is drawing 175 watts doing the same thing :D

Hey, a fellow Pentium M user!

I was using the integrated GMA 900 in my HTPC up until high-bitrate 1080p H264 started coming from Europe as well as 1080p VC1.

However, mpeg 2 accel was almost certainly disabled for card load issues, I have a few video sourced 1080i files that it almost chokes on because they appear to be hard to deinterlace. 1080i material which is film based decodes with much less load on both cpu and gpu. I have o/c the card a little, +50mhz ram and core which brings me to about 92% gpu peak on a tuff clip and usually 60-70% on more normal video material.

I am having very similar results, although I haven't been able to successfully overclock the card (I'm trying to use RivaTuner, but the clockspeed does not actually change in its stats screen.)

I have a 1080i MPEG2 ts music video that uses all of the GPU when hardware accelerated in Zoom Player (CyberLink and EVR) or in PowerDVD, with a horrid result (at best: I get <30fps and tearing; but normally I get lots of misdecoded blocks and sometimes lines/small squares of glitches.) The picture is poorly deinterlaced.

There is a white line down the left side of this video that appears solid in Zoom Player with CyberLink MPEG2 hardware acceleration turned off, appears as a dashed line in PowerDVD with acceleration turned off, and flashes when using hardware acceleration with either.

With Zoom Player and no hardware acceleration, the system uses ~70% CPU and spends most of its time at 2.4GHz and 2.1GHz. (note-- I prevent the CPU from transitioning to prevent audio skips when actually playing movies). This provides the best result. CyberLink does fine, but the interlacing isn't as good.

Film MPEG2 1080i and all MPEG2 1080p sources including Blu-ray discs run perfectly with or without without GPU acceleration, with <20% CPU usage accelerated.

Nearly all VC1 and H264 movies work fine, except for certain h264 streams that will not decode with CyberLink's decoder and hardware acceleration (green screen when acceleration is turned on, occurs on PureVideo HD as well). For those, I find that CoreAVC provides the best result (CyberLink's picture with thsoe files and software decoding is actually rather poor.)

Agreed, well done arfster.

I have a 1080i MPEG2 ts music video that uses all of the GPU when hardware accelerated in Zoom Player (CyberLink and EVR) or in PowerDVD, with a horrid result (at best: I get <30fps and tearing; but normally I get lots of misdecoded blocks and sometimes lines/small squares of glitches.) The picture is poorly deinterlaced.


Hi, how's the GPU % when you turn off Aero? I'm assuming you're using a 2400pro - if so dumping aero will drop the gpu % from 100%-ish to 65ish (or something similar, can't remember exact figures). For whatever reason, aero is gobbling gpu% even when you have a video taking up the whole screen, and this is more than the card can cope with.

Hey there,

I'm wondering, I'm using PowerDVD 7.3 and how do I activate hardware deinterlacing? There are options in the "advanced" section, but the only intelligible ones are Bob and Weave, the other ones are just strings of hexadecimal that resemble registry entries, but I have no idea what they mean, and they don't work very well at all. With or without HW acceleration ticked. Without it ticked, though, PDVD's software pixel adaptive deinterlacing seems to work much better at least with 1080i/60 content (off-air HDTV) and dvds. I am guessing it shouldn't be this way?

I have tried every possible combination of PDVD's HW deinterlacing options and the options in CCC, but nothing seems to work, not even well enough. It's pretty bad. On the other hand, my GPU is pretty much maxing out, so it may be that limitation. I'm probably gonna still get the 2600pro from HIS I referenced earlier. I hope they don't take too long.