h.264 decoding on 8800GT

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codename47

Gawd
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Mar 7, 2003
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Do I have to turn h.264 decoding on in the drivers in order to benefit from it? I was running some 1080P h.264 material and my x2 3800 is getting trashed... is it just the limited power of the cpu or is the 8600GT not doing its job...

Thanks for any help.
 
The 8800, or G80 does not decode h.264 content on the GPU; the 8500/8600, or G84/G86 does though.

Of course you said 8800GT then 880GT both of which don't exist, so I don't know if you mean 8600GT/8500GT/8800GTS/8800GTX all of which could be what you mean...
 
sorry typed too fast and wasn't paying attention :) fixed... I traded in my 7600GS for teh 8600GT b/c of the decoding.... any help?
 
codename47 said:
sorry typed too fast and wasn't paying attention :) fixed... I traded in my 7600GS for teh 8600GT b/c of the decoding.... any help?
Click to expand...

Yeah. The 8600GT should be decoding. Perhaps you need to install some different codecs, or install the drivers after installing whatever media player it is you are using.

Or try something which lets you explicitly specify the renderer (Eg. NOT Windows Media Player).
 
ok I'll mess around some. It just doesn't seem to be offloading as much as what I've seen in the reviews. However they were also using faster CPUs so??? Maybe this is as good as it gets but I hope not. I've been using windows media player and media player classic in Vista but maybe I'll try something else like zoom player or VLC. I think those two programs allow me to set up hardware support for decoding. Currently I'm using the "combined" graphics pack b/c I wanted windows media player to be able to play mkv files that are coded in h.264.

Thanks for the help but if you have any other quick ideas let me know...
 
no, the whole point is to offload the work from the CPU, pretty much the only thing the CPU should be doing is being wasted on their worthless HDCP algorithms if its a Blu-ray/HD-DVD. You should be looking at what is shown in the reviews, about 2%, if its any higher than I 10-15% I would say its not working right unless you have a very slow cpu.
 
I run a 4400+ non overclocked, and h.264 at 1080p is too much for me to handle, with libavc, but that's because they haven't implemented a multithreaded decoder. Only CoreAVC has that, but it would seem like they are having a few problems at the moment...
 
So another question... will this play files that are encoded h.264 but saved as .mkv or something other than just a straight HD-DVD/Blue-Ray DVD?

I know that they don't support full play back of VC-1 files which is lame but is it the file type that matters or if it is encoded as h.264?
 
Optional87 said:
The 8800, or G80 does not decode h.264 content on the GPU; the 8500/8600, or G84/G86 does though.

Of course you said 8800GT then 880GT both of which don't exist, so I don't know if you mean 8600GT/8500GT/8800GTS/8800GTX all of which could be what you mean...
Click to expand...



according to http://www.nvidia.com/page/8800_features.html

the 8800s
Hardware Decode Acceleration:
Provides ultra-smooth playback of H.264, VC-1, WMV and MPEG-2 HD and SD movies.
 
codename47 said:
Do I have to turn h.264 decoding on in the drivers in order to benefit from it? I was running some 1080P h.264 material and my x2 3800 is getting trashed... is it just the limited power of the cpu or is the 8600GT not doing its job...

Thanks for any help.
Click to expand...

To set up Windows Media Player 10 for hardware overlay mode, follow these steps:
Click on “Tools” > “Options” on the menu bar
Click on the “Performance” tab
Click on the “Advanced” button
Under the “Video Acceleration” section check “Use video mixing renderer” and “Use overlays”
Under the “DVD video” section an uncheck “Use the video mixing renderer” and “Use overlays” This is the equivalent settings to force the rendering path to be the same as the Video Acceleration section, in overlay
mode.
Make sure “Enable full-screen mode switch” is turned off. This willensure that when you fullscreen the application all of the filtering and scaling accelerated in PureVideo are not affected by changing the display
resolution

Note: That you have to have Nvidia's Pure Video software installed for this to work.
 
luke51087 said:
according to http://www.nvidia.com/page/8800_features.html

the 8800s
Hardware Decode Acceleration:
Provides ultra-smooth playback of H.264, VC-1, WMV and MPEG-2 HD and SD movies.
Click to expand...

It does a bit, as most GPUs have for awhile.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2977 -- the 8800 series does as much decoding as the 7 series, I believe. You can see the difference between the 7 series and the 8500/8600 at the graph above. The CAVLC/CABAC decoding is what eats up CPU cycles.
 
Sniper_Merc said:
To set up Windows Media Player 10 for hardware overlay mode, follow these steps:
Click on “Tools” > “Options” on the menu bar
Click on the “Performance” tab
Click on the “Advanced” button
Under the “Video Acceleration” section check “Use video mixing renderer” and “Use overlays”
Under the “DVD video” section an uncheck “Use the video mixing renderer” and “Use overlays” This is the equivalent settings to force the rendering path to be the same as the Video Acceleration section, in overlay
mode.
Make sure “Enable full-screen mode switch” is turned off. This willensure that when you fullscreen the application all of the filtering and scaling accelerated in PureVideo are not affected by changing the display
resolution

Note: That you have to have Nvidia's Pure Video software installed for this to work.
Click to expand...

I wish I had windows media player 10 :( Vista has version 11 installed and it doesn't give the advanced option in the tools to perform the above operation. I installed the combined community codec pack and it has ffdshow with some options for overay with hardware acceleration but that didn't seem to change anything either.

I do have nvidia's decoder installed too but no love.... I just wish it would work. Seems like I'm having too many problems with this. I also wish some of the reviewers would have explained how they got theirs to work b/c little to no explanation can be found on google or the benchmarks on common hardware sites. There has got to be an easy way like what you did for wmp 10.
 
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