ATI Radeon HD 2X00 (2400,2600,2900) series owners thread - Page 71

Okay, proof of concept achieved. I was able to get King Kong on HD DVD to play from the external drive with Cyberlink PowerDVD 7.3 Ultra and unmodified ATI 7.6 drivers, under Windows Vista with 2400Pro. Had some problems with blotches on the bottom of the screen from time to time (now I'll have to figure out what these are called!). Just used the analog drivers and the VGA output to the monitor. In catalyst control center pretty set everything to performance (vs. quality) when there was a choice.

Now the fun is to get some tweaks going to make things a bit better.

I have done this and it didn't work for the GeCube card.
Can someone who has edited the .ini-files and got it to work please send them over? (some http-file service or something)

Thanks arfster. As I said, I'm mainly seeing this with with UK DVB broadcasts from a Terratec Cinergy 2400i dual tuner card with standard MS MPEG2 decoder in Vista. My previous rig was a NVidia 6150 with XP MCE. No problems at all with this setup, but it was very poor for HD, so I had to change. My friend is using same rig, but Nova-T 500 dual DVB, and sees the same problem, so it's not the tuner.

Happens on pretty much all channels, even the strong ones like BBC1,2 etc. Also seems to happen more on static shots. It either doesn't happen on panning and fast action material, or I just don't notice it.

It's livable with, but slightly annoying. I was hoping later drivers would fix it.

That's the difference with my setup then, I use other decoders. Seems to be a common theme in these threads that people using the Vista decoder have weird issues though. At a guess, it could be the point where the decoder switches from bob to weave. If the decoder was interacting properly with hardware acceleration this shouldn't happen though, but I have seen similar problems before with various decoders (eg previous versions of PDVD the decoder couldn't initiate with vmr9, nvidia's decoder still misdetects between film/video, and the 3104 pdvd mpeg2 decoder with drivers 7.8/7.9 has problems with judder when not on auto deinterlacing mode).

You must doing something wrong because i have also a Gecube 2400Pro card!!under XP!

Watch about the install.ini which is also located under the root folder of the drivers, but the right one is at the DRIVERS/Install.ini

Ok, thanks for the explanation. I guess I'm using VMC pretty much as everyone else does (with the MS decoder). You mention you use 'other' decoders, and don't see these issues. There's a limited selection that are actually VMC compatible, so can I ask which one you use?

If you are running MCE2005 and an AGP 2400, I doubt you will ever get it to work.

I gave up trying.

You cannot get sound over HDMI without the ATI specific dongle. AGP cards may well not support sound over HDMI. PCI-E cards probably all support sound over HDMI.

The Sapphire 2400 Pro PCI-E worked fine sending sound over HDMI to my Sharp LCD.

Hello,

I'm also having this "red coulour shift" problem, mostly in tv logo's and tv/talkshows with large red backgrounds.

Fooling arround a bit with the avivo settings i found the problem does not appear when i uncheck the pulldown detection in the deinterlace options.

This gives a great picture on Sd video in Media Portal + Cyberlink 7.3 + Evr, except for the fact MediaPortal crashes when i enable evr, and using vrm9 gives no picture at all in MP if i change annything in the deinteralace options.

Guess i have to watch something else then talkshows untill ati or MP gets this fixed.

Long storry short: the problem seems to be related to the "pulldown detection" option.

I'm using a 2600pro from Club3d btw.

I am sorry for you but i was talking to "crozk" about the problem with the drivers!!

And i was talking about Win XP!!

I applied the registry tweaks for Windows Vista and my HD2600 card and rebooted. The video now has gone from the occassional stutter / slowdown to looking like a slide show. I am sending a 720p signal to my plasma tv. Any suggestions?

Thank you very much

Hrrrm, interesting. Are you in PAL or NTSC land? PAL users shouldn't have problems from pulldown.

If using NTSC, this does tend to suggest a film/video detection problem (aka bad edits) with your decoder. If it's hopping between one and two, you'll be strobing between 24p and 60i, and at the point it changes you'll get some odd artifacting. With pulldown detection switched off you'll be at 60i all the time, which means no flickering between film/video, but other problems with film (because it's being screwed to a 30p format).

For Vista/EVR, if it's driver 7.8/7.9 then the Cyberlink 7.3 mpeg2 decoder doesn't like anything other than auto in the deinterlace selection. You might want to try ATI's AVIVO decoder. With 7.7 the cyberlink decoder is fine.

Not surprised you're having mediaportal EVR problems, I found that very unstable. It is quite a new feature though.

I still use 7.7 with the Cyberlink decoder (no improvement with later drivers, so I never updated the HTPC). With 7.9 the cyberlink mpeg2 doesn't get along with EVR except with basic deinterlacing, so the ati avivo decoder is the answer.

Thanks for your sugestions arfster.

Gonna go and give the avivo decoder a spin, and try to go back to 7.7 to see what gives the best combination.

I'm living in europe PAL country btw, using a floppy dvb-s card to receive astra1. Also got a DVB-C card gonna give that a try also to see if the input tv card/signal is causing the problem.

Autumn 2007 Video Processing Face Off
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...ideo_shootout/

I wonder using the tweaked driver would help... but upsampling really sucks for the Radeon's.

Damn... should I just forget about HTPC and go for a PS3 when it comes to media playback? That sucks.

Few quick thoughts from whizzing through it:

Monster cables? Sigh, doesn't look promising.

A Monster Line conditioner? Rofl, duh, and ffs.

What should be a PS3 picture is labelled Nvidia with the first set of comparisons. Which is correct? It's also displaced by a few pixels compared to the others.

Cyberlink mpeg2 + Vista + ATI 7.9 ..... oops, bad combination. With 7.9, you have to use another decoder, or backtrack to 7.7 if you want to use cyberlink for mpeg2. Wouldn't be surprised if that's deinterlacing rather than IVTCing incidentally, given the problems reported here with 7.9 and IVTC.

The Bluray screenshots of Knightley and Depp are both expanded. Bad that they didn't notice that (come on, it's obvious), worse that they tried to compare it to other images.

PS3 pic in the 3rd set is expanded. Some extra layer of procesing is being applied here obviously - I wonder why, and that else it did. The PS3 gets special compliments here from them though, when in fact they're just seeing the expansion providing dramatically different black and white levels.

They were also unable to get vforcemaxressize to work, which rather invalidates most of the ATI HD tests. Not exactly difficult to do either.

No mention of HD expansion issues on the ATI.

This being a default 2600 install, colour and flesh will be at 25, trdenoise and dxva_detailenhance on, etc etc.

Testing denoising via the HDHQV image isn't very useful, because there's no camera pan involved. A really good denoiser here might result in ghosting elsewhere, or any number of other problems. Of course, since this is the test everyone's now using, guess what the drivers get optimised for? *fumes*

What's the point of screenshots of _temporal_ denoising? Waste of time. I really hope they didn't make their decisions using the screenshots, although if they didn't then testing the difference with all that equipment to shift in/out would be pretty tricky. By the time you'd switched from one to the other, you won't have a detailed enough picture in your mind anymore to make adequate comparison.

Come to think of it, no mention of blindtesting at all. That's the only way to really do this sort of test.

More generally, where are the decoder fidelity tests? It's not exactly hard to do a few pixel by pixel comparisons.


There's also the presumption that maximum sharpness before artifacting is best. What if the director intended a degree of softness? What if you're giving undue prominence to features that aren't intended to be so obvious? This often happens with hair, and I think the PS3 looks to be doing this a touch, rendering it a bit unnatural. This also happens with the facepaint eyes on Depp's face - the PS3 version makes them appear glossy as if they were smooth polished stones, rather than matt face paint. By delineating the edges too exactly, you mess with the overall image.

Nvidia also wins overall imo on those screenshots, mainly because it maintains texture the best. This is slightly visible with Keira Knightley's skin, and more on the third with the texture of the trees and seas imo. That's the key thing about displaying a huge vista scene like that imo.

Anyway, I did pretty extensive tests myself between a 8500, 8600 and 2400 a while back (and later between 2400 and 2600) - and found the scaling pretty much identical. See http://rapidshare.com/files/43460708/MR___news.zip.html

The above article only tells us what we already know: that ATI's drivers are a joke. There's a reason why all these tweaks exist :-)

Please, please and again please! Can you upload your drivers? or at least the most important files, the .ini-files.

Yes - I do not see the boot screen. All I see is windows - but when I reboot the machine - I do not see the boot screen.. So I cannot see the BIOS - if I need to change anything. Any ideas??? Again - I have an HIS 2600 Pro and I have a DVI connection on my TV and a DVI connection on the card. I have a 25 ' cable. The cable is DVI-HDMI. I connect the DVI end to TV and the HDMI end to the HIS card with a generic HDMI->DVI adapter.

MCE2005 is XP, hence the mentioning of the issue.

Do not worry, I will ignore you from here out.

Hello,

I have an HIS 2600 Pro, Vista 32 bit, I have CCC 7.7 (with most of the registry tweaks). I am about to install CyberLink Ultra and I want to know which patch/version I should use. I see a fair amount of talk - but no-one comes out and says which is the most stable.

UPDATE: this is quite a bit out of date, and some things have been fixed. With 8.3-8-5, I find the only absolutely necessary is to standardise levels with UseBT601CSC=1, and the acceleration fixes if you use dual screens. Use others only to correct specific problems - it does vary with different cards and OS's.

UPDATE2: if you have an AGP card, even this lot of tweaks might not fix things. Unfortunately, there are a bundle of problems with agp cards, and it's just pure luck if they work or not.

UPDATE3: with 8.8 2600+dual monitors can be made to accelerate all again. Set vforceuvdcd1 & vforceuvdh264 to 1, and dxva_nohddecode to zero.



Useful app to apply tweaks:
http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/ati-hd2x00/

Quick way to apply individual ones in the right place:
http://bluesky23.hp.infoseek.co.jp/DXVAChecker_1810.zip

(run the app, right-click any of the listings in the top box, driver settings, change stuff, OK, reboot if in XP)


LIST OF REG TWEAKS:

The "UseBT601CSC"="1" driver expands SD levels, the same way as HD is expanded automatically by the drivers, giving you 0-255, aka PC levels. If you want the original 16-235 (video levels) then go into CCC/avivo video/basic colour and turn "use application settings" off, brightness to 16, contrast 86 - pretty much exactly reversing the expansion. Note that in Vista EVR will always expand, and so will VMR9 with hardware acceleration. However, VMR9 without acceleration will not expand at start, and neither will the CCC colour controls work, until you manually move a colour control via the likes of procamp. (this isn't a fix though, because when it doesn't expand it gets moody and instead resorts to screwing the colours).

Note that this can create a problem with HD 720p material that has a wider aspect ratio than 16/9, and has a vertical resolution less than 720 lines (eg mkv 720p at 2.4:1 gives resolution of 1280*533 if encoded without black bars). These are encoded with standard HD bt709, but the card thinks that all <720 is SD, so assumes bt601. So, bt601 on bt709 material = colours unsurprisingly wonky. I think possibly the drivers respect material with colourspace flags though, so this might not be an issue - need to test. If needed you could use Haali renderer set to auto, and it'll select the correct one (breaks acceleration though).


More advanced solution to levels: use ffdshow-tryouts to output RGB32 high quality (with fullrange set under RGB conversion, the default "standard" setting confusingly actually expands). This breaks acceleration, but means no expansion. Note you'll need to select between bt601/709 for sd/HD, or you can make autoswitching profiles based on resolution (i use horizontal res above/below 1024 to do this). Note this also disables all driver based postprocessing, from sharpening/denoising to deinterlacing, as all of these require YUY2/YV12 to be fed to the renderer (and deinterlacing requires nv12 for anything better than basic bob). If this is all gibberish, probably not a good idea to use it, as you need to be fairly familiar with ffdshow for this.
Quick guide here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=6237


I don't know how XP behaves in software mode with expansion, so you'll have to experiment a little. A good way is to printscreen some video and paste into irfanview, then you can click any pixel and it'll tell you in the window header what the RGB values are. If it's 0/0/0 in the blackest bits, or 255/255/255 in the whitest bits, that means it's expanded. Non-expanded, ie the original, will be around 16 and 235 respectively.


If you're changing drivers, it's a good idea to run the complete ATI self-destruct sequence to rid your machine of driver remnants: in control panel/programs, uninstall ATI Catalyst Install Manager, and tell it to delete all ATI software. Reboot after, then delete any ATI directories in c:\\program files, and if you have them run drivercleaner or xdc.

Edit: quick update, I find uninstall/reboot/drivercleaner completely wipes all traces, both files and in the registry.


These tweaks will work with any driver version - some of the key names changed so this covers them all.


THE REG STRINGS (yes, they're all apparently reg strings, even in XP)

"Fleshtone_DEF"="0"
"Fleshtone_DE_MIN"="0"
"ColorVibrance_DEF"="0"
"ColorVibrance_DE_MIN"="0"
"ColorVibrance_NA"="0"
"Fleshtone_NA"="0"
"DXVA_DetailEnhance"="0"
"DXVA_NOHDDECODE"="0"
"VForce24FPS1080MPEG2"="0"
"VForce24FPS1080H264"="0"
"VForce24FPS1080VC1"="0"
"DXVA_Only24FPS1080MPEG2"="0"
"DXVA_Only24FPS1080H264"="0"
"DXVA_Only24FPS1080VC1"="0"
"DXVA_WMV_NA"="0"
"SORTOverrideFPSCaps"="0"
"TrDenoise"="0"
"UseBT601CSC"="1"
"VForceMaxResSize"="2800000"
"SORTOverrideVidSizeCaps"="2800000"
"VforceUVDVC1"="1"
"VforceUVDh264"="1"

2600 only:
"DI_METHOD"="5"
"DI_METHOD_DEF"="5"



EXPLANATIONS:
trdenoise 0 = turns off forced temporal denoise, which can just blur things. Even when set on (as it is by default), this appears to only work for interlaced content, and when motion-adaptive or vector-adaptive deinterlacing is in use. It also seems to be broken in the Vista 7.7 drivers, but works in 7.10. When on, it has a hefty hit on the shaders, 15% on a 2600XT. Probably it defaults to off for the 2400, as it would probably equate to 30-40% there (if anyone can test please let me know, just turn it on and off with va deinterlacing in use, and watch rivatuner gpu).

UPDATE: in 8.3 ATI added a CCC slider for denoise, which defaults to 64 (too much imo, try 30ish). Note this only works when MA or VA deinterlacing are engaged - this is correct imo, as film origin stuff doesn't need denoised. If you only want SD denoise, you can set vforcehddenoise=0. To enable sliders for XP, set Denoise_NA=0


dxva_detailenhance 0 = turns off forced sharpener.

UPDATE: in 8.3 ATI added sliders for detail and denoise. The above tweak is no longer necessary, just untick in CCC. Note the detail enhance appears to be totally disabled for HD. It does work for all SD though, progressive & interlaced. I reccomend putting the slider to 50. To enable sliders for XP, set Detail_NA=0.


VForceMaxResSize 2800000 (aka SORTOverrideVidSizeCaps in Cat7.7 and earlier) = this sets the PDVD HDDVD/Bluray max render size in pixels, but the default setting is so small that it can't fill a 1080p screen. The formula appears to be screen width squared * 0.75. On a 2600 the default value when the key doesn't exist appears to be around 2.3 million, which is enough for a 1600*1200 screen, but not for 1920 pixels wide. For that the 2.8 million value above is enough, but if you have a 2500*1600 screen it needs to be 4687500 or greater. Since there's maybe a performance reason for a limit, it's probably not worth setting it higher than you need.

DXVA_WMV_NA set to 0. Makes the CCC checkbox visible in CCC that allows controls WMV acceleration. Still no WMV acceleration in Vista regardless though :-(

Fleshtone and ColorVibrance minimum/defaults set to 0. The standard 2600 install has these on and at 25, but if you disable them in CCC they actually still continue to work at their default, ie 25. Setting mins and defaults to 0 means that when you deselect them in CCC, they actually turn off - your choice of course, but several people have reported that vibrance in particular results in posterisation.
UPDATE: note, with newer drivers this seems not to be an issue. Not sure quite when they fixed it though, so if you're using older drivers it's worth checking.

ColorVibrance_NA and Fleshtone_NA to 0. This makes the sliders visible in XP. Does nothing in Vista, they're visible already.

UseBT601CSC set to 1. This causes SD to expand to 0-255, in the same manner as HD (which expands regardless what you do) for a consistent single calibration between the two.

(2600 only) default deinterlacing mode to vector adaptive. In Vista there's a bug with 7.9 where auto mode in CCC just selects bob for 1080i. This reg change forces the issue. For the integrated/2400/3400 cards, see vforcedeint....

VForceDeint = 2/3/6. These force the availability of various deinterlacing modes, which are restricted on the lower models due to limited shader power. 6 allows all to be available, and you can then manually select which you want in CCC. Watch your gpu %.....

VForce24FPS1080MPEG2, VForce24FPS1080H264, VForce24FPS1080VC1 all to 0 (and dxva_only24fps etc for cat7.7 and earlier). Allows the 2400 to run European 1080i50 accelerated. For the 2600 these already work, so makes no difference.

dxva_nohddecode set to 0. Enables mpeg2 HD acceleration for the 2400, does nothing for the 2600 (except in official cat7.10). This can potentially create problems - if your GPU (see rivatuner) is being maxxed out by 1080i mpeg2 after this, set this back to 1 and use PowerDVD with hardware deinterlacing in options/video/advanced forced to 3C (vector-adaptive, the best) or 55 (motion-adaptive, next best). This avoids the enormous hit of mpeg2 HD decoding, which is around 50% GPU on a 2400pro or 35% on a 2600pro, but still gets you hardware deinterlacing. As above, in Vista the 2400 drivers will happily ignore whatever deinterlacing mode you select in CCC. XP is better behaved and will obey the CCC mode, but outside PDVD to get deinterlacing without acceleration the only choice (afaik) is the Bitcontrol mpeg2 decoder, or ffdshow set to decode mpeg2 (in codecs, you also have to go to the ffdshow output tab, tick "set interlace flag" and set to bob, then above that tick only NV12 of the colour types). Unfortunately with these methods you get no choice of what deinterlacing mode is used, unlike PDVD, so Vista 2400 users are a bit screwed.

VforceUVDVC1/VforceUVDh264 =1. With 8.1 onwards, ATI broke acceleration with dual display on lower end models (which includes the fairly powerful 2600xt for some reason, but not the 3800 cards), if the second display is HD (ie >719 lines vertical, thus pretty much every PC monitor). The above tweaks get acceleration working again. Quite why they chose to do this I have no idea, since every card from the 2400 up is capable of dualscreen acceleration.


Other known bugs:
* mpeg2 not in UVD but in shaders
* wmv acceleration broken in Vista
* 2400 Bluray mpeg2 not accelerated (and in 7.10 2600 also)
* 50hz displays have no overscan correction
* (cat7.8-7.10) Vista EVR+cyberlink mpeg2 results in juddervision deinterlacing errors (this includes Vista PDVD itself, ati avivo codec+EVR is fine though, vmr9 is unaffected)
* (cat7.8-7.10) deinterlacing set to auto in CCC bobs for 1080i h264. Forcing vector-adaptive works, at least in Vista.

I couldn't agree more, and to add something, I wouldn't take resolution tips from someone who says something like this:

960p has only the potential for twice the resolution than 480p. 1080p is only a bit more than 2X the resolution. Many confuse number of pixels with resolution because of the "megapixel race" in digital cameras, but resolution only goes in one dimension. So OK, maybe it could be forgiven if the word he used was "resolution", but "four times sharper"? That's just plain wrong.

And I say "potential" because with all 1080p movies I've seen that came from a 35mm film source, the reality is that at that point the resolution limiting factor is either the lens (you can actually see the aberrations) or the source film itself. You can tell how much more resolution potential 1080p has by viewing movies that either were done totally in a computer (like CG animated "toy-story-clone" movies) or one like Corpse Bride, which was done with Canon 1D Mark II cameras (8 megapixel digital SLRs), whose source resolution is a great deal higher than the final output, hence all the equipment required (lenses, processing equipment, etc) outresolves a 1080p image.

So because of this, while most movies' resolution will indeed be limited by 480p, also most won't be limited by 1080p (they'll already be limited at that point), so the actual "sharpness" difference would be less than 2X, in my opinion for those movies. Maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (or King Kong) movies, as they're new and high-budget (much better source material) will approach being limited by 1080p, but even in that case it's only 2X, or a little over 2X "sharpness" over DVD.

So yes, the "up to 6X resolution than DVD" line coming from HD-DVD (or is it bluray?) is super-ultra ********.

with ati mpeg decoder (kmp, dxva mode (superspeed), xp, vmr9)



what do you think?

Just got an AGP Visionteck 2600PRO installed in ECS 848P-A motherboard. I tried the 8.4 drivers from Visionteck's web site and also the one on the included CD. In both cases the install process seems to go OK and eventually asks to reboot the computer but when Windows restarts no drivers are installed. Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks John

Thanks for the definitive list: it's much appreciated.

However, with a 2400Pro Catalyst 7.7 (with all your tweaks) XP PowerDVD 7.3.2911 and hardware acceleration enabled, changing Brightness, Contrast, Digital Vibrance or Fleshtone in CCC Avivo Video has absolutely no effect that I can see. The tweaks exist because the Digital Vibrance and Fleshtone sliders now appear in CCC and I have confirmed them in registry (and I have rebooted).

If I alter Brightness in CCC Avivo Video with hardware acceleration disabled, I immediately see the brightening effect (and I expect the other controls will work as well).

I now don't trust that any of the CCC controls are actually getting used by PowerDVD in the way they were intended when in hardware acceleration mode on my particular setup.

Anyone have any ideas on why this might be so?

Hrrrrrm. Might be that XP PDVD's renderer (overlay was always presumed) isn't affected by system colour controls when acceleration is on, in the same way vmr9 isn't in Vista if you disable mixer mode. Whatever routine on the card that is used for colour manipulation simply isn't working as a result. Just checked and Vista PDVD is instantly affected by any CCC colour change, but that's probably cos it uses EVR.

Do PDVD's internal colour controls do anything?

Hello

My Vista 32 Install with the HD2600 is showing the DI_METHOD entry to be binary instead of a String. Should I delete the binary value and create a string?

Thanks

OK, now I am running the official ati catalyst drivers 7.7 and Cyberlink Power DVD 7.3. I again have HD DVD running, but only with the VGA output and coax spdif to the receiver.

It appears that the card does not like me having both the HDMI and the VGA connected simultaneously. Everything went more smoothly when I "turn off" the HDMI connection in the receiver control panel.

Is this a common issue...that one can not have the HDMI and VGA active simultaneously? Is there a way in software to alternate between the two; or do I physically have to disconnect the VGA in order to experiment with the HDMI?

Personally I am using profiles in CCC to enable 'Primary' display only. Switching between displays can be done by setting hot keys. Don't know if this will help your problem, though.

Do you, or somebody else know if this affects something else also? 601 colorspace apparently is SD colourspace and living in PAL land with some HD available it makes me a little worried.

Also I don't seem to get too much level difference without it, should check it with irfanview, I guess.