PCI Video Card - 1080p playback at all possible?

[thebeephaha]

I have seen the some new PCI 8400 cards on the market, anyone know if they can playback 1080 okay?

Reason being is I want to combine my server and HTPC in one and my server only has a free PCI left, the PCI-E are being used for raid cards etc.

I currently have some ancient ATI Rage 128 or something that can't even do widescreen haha.

 

[silent-circuit]

Should be able to. Assuming your server's CPU isn't crap and it won't be multitasking while playing back HD content it's really a non-issue.

 

[pxc]

It will depend on the codec/playback software. If it's a type of video that the 8400 PCI can offload, it should work fine with playback software that supports that acceleration. PCI @ 33MHz doesn't have enough bandwidth to display 1080p using pure CPU-based software decoding.

 

[Red Falcon]

Actually, a PCI card of any kind, even an 8400, will not playback 1080p faster than choppy-at-best.

The reason isn't the GPU or decoding hardware/software, it's the PCI bus itself.

It's only 133MB/s, and that's if no other slots are being occupied b/c they all share the same bandwidth/bus.

The limitation is strictly the bus itself. I've tried this myself with an 8400 PCI 512MB card.

Playing SD is ok, but anything at 720p or beyond and it would choke up, even on a modern dual-core machine.

EDIT: But it would be an upgrade over the current integrated GPU and would have better playback, just not in the HD category.

 

[pxc]

Actually, a PCI card of any kind, even an 8400, will not playback 1080p faster than choppy-at-best.

The reason isn't the GPU or decoding hardware/software, it's the PCI bus itself.

The 8400GS, including the PCI version, can decode certain formats on the GPU from a compressed stream sent to it (far less than PCI bandwidth). It really depends on the codec used and the playback software (which offloads decoding to the GPU) as I described above.

NVIDIA® PureVideo™ HD Technology:
The combination of high-definition video decode acceleration and post-processing that delivers unprecedented picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color, and precise image scaling for movies and video. Feature requires supported video software. Features may vary by product.

Discrete, Programmable Video Processor:
NVIDIA PureVideo is a discrete programmable processing core in NVIDIA GPUs that provides superb picture quality and ultra-smooth movies with low CPU utilization and power.

Hardware Decode Acceleration:
Provides ultra-smooth playback of H.264, VC-1, WMV and MPEG-2 HD and SD movies.

Depending on how much is offloaded to the GPU and how much traffic is required for coprocessing (CPU/GPU), 1080p playback may or may not be smooth for some codecs. But I wouldn't make a blanket statement that 1080p *can't* be smooth.

 

[HaMMerHeD]

It may be OK.

At 1920x1200, with 32-bit color and 24 frames per second, you are talking about 189MB per second if the CPU is doing the decoding and you are updating every pixel every frame.

Obviously, the whole point of compressed video is that you don't need to update every pixel every frame. But even if you take away 1/3 of the content, you are looking at 125MB/sec, which is pretty close to the 133MB/sec maximum.

So I think you will have mixed results, and it will depend on the compression quality.