Is GeForce 8400 GS worth anything?

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Sat Mar 14, 2009 2:20 pm

I am thinking of downgrading (?) my 6800 GS PCI-Express to a 8400 GS. Why? Because I see that gaming truly is nothing for me and I've stopped playing most games. If I play something then a flash game @ Miniclip.com or Nitrome. I'll be running Linux and I do see more use for accelerating video playback performance and the 8400 GS is the cheapest (?) card to support VDPAU under Linux.

Should I be doing this or not? My CPU is a Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 2.0 GHz (stock is just 0.2 Ghz slower, a MASSIVE overclock

)

fyleow · Post by **fyleow** » Sat Mar 14, 2009 5:40 pm

Does video playback currently lag on your setup? If not, why bother?

Mr Evil · Post by **Mr Evil** » Sat Mar 14, 2009 6:13 pm

I have an Athlon 64 x2 4000+ and an 8600GTS, which should be very similar to an 8400GS for video decoding. Playing 1080p h.264 videos in VLC under WinXP uses a mere 20% CPU with the acceleration working, but it can't play it without skipping if the acceleration is disabled. There might be some power efficiency benefits too, but I haven't measured.

There are probably plenty of more detailed benchmarks out there.

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 2:42 am

I will in the near future upgrade to a Blu-ray player, but currently I have no 1080p media to test if playback really needs any extra acceleration from the GPU. Anyone know where I can get a sample 1080p H.264 video?

rpsgc · Post by **rpsgc** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 5:50 am

LodeHacker wrote:I will in the near future upgrade to a Blu-ray player, but currently I have no 1080p media to test if playback really needs any extra acceleration from the GPU. Anyone know where I can get a sample 1080p H.264 video?

Here:
http://www.h264info.com/clips.html

720p and 1080p H.264 clips.

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 8:08 am

Ok, 720p is very smooth and CPU utilization is below 40%. With 1080p though, CPU utilization was around 50% and playback was not as smooth as it could be. It was playable, but at certain points the video would skip a millisecond or so, but the audio did not suffer.

I believe if I was switching to a 8400 GS I would not benefit from anything. Maybe there is VDPAU but then again the 8400 GS is a much less powerful card than my current 6800 GS.

thejamppa · Post by **thejamppa** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 9:54 am

Maybe 9400 GT might be better alternative if you need Full HD support etc?

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 12:12 pm

LodeHacker wrote:Ok, 720p is very smooth and CPU utilization is below 40%. With 1080p though, CPU utilization was around 50% and playback was not as smooth as it could be. It was playable, but at certain points the video would skip a millisecond or so, but the audio did not suffer.

With the right decoder you could probably decode 1080p without problems. CPU at 50% sounds like you're using a single treaded decoder that's using 100% of one core. With a multithreaded decoder such as CoreAVC both cores would be used.

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 1:15 pm

I simply used mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=2.0 -vo xv *mp4

Maybe it's the current decoder in MPlayer. I'll try tomorrow with a different decoder. You don't have experience with this stuff in Linux, dont you?

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 1:59 pm

mplayer uses FFmpeg (libavcodec really) and it's currently not multithreaded. CoreAVC is for Windows but it's possible to use it under Linux as well.
http://code.google.com/p/coreavc-for-linux/

VDPAU would be best for you of course, I'm just saying that it's possible to decode 1080p in software with your current system.

mczak · Post by **mczak** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 6:06 pm

Vicotnik wrote:mplayer uses FFmpeg (libavcodec really) and it's currently not multithreaded.

Sad but true (except if your h.264 content uses slice-based encoding, in this case decoding can indeed be multithreaded). There's ffmpeg-mt, which should fix this. You can integrate this into mplayer, this mostly works though there are still bugs (and don't forget to tell it how many threads you want).

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Mon Apr 06, 2009 7:02 am

Okay! I found someone interested in exchanging their ASUS EN8400GS SILENT/HTP/256M for my 6800 GS. I checked that the 8400 GS in question is indeed based on the newer G98 core, for full video acceleration in hardware. This combined with a discrete sound card and an external Dolby Digital capable A/V receiver, HDTV here I come!

Even if the 6800 GS is faster, I'm willing to do this because the ZALMAN on my 6800 GS makes too much noise. I can't go wrong with a passive 8400 GS

Also if a GeForce2 is good enough to accelerate the few emulators I play ROMs with ( which actually require more CPU than GPU power ) I am certain that with the 8400 GS my emulation needs are filled.

twoscoreandfour · Post by **twoscoreandfour** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 5:29 pm

Did you check out the wiki page for Pure Video?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIDIA_PureVideo

There is little difference between PV2 and PV3, really only VC-1 acceleration, and that is hardly popular.

In any case an 8400gs or a 94/9500gt would be very decent. I *think* 9500gt has the best power consumption. VDPAU works on any of these cards.

There is also a project that allows ffmpeg to offload to the CoreAVC codec, if you own it:

http://code.google.com/p/coreavc-for-linux/

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 4:46 am

The only difference is not only VC-1 acceleration, the newer G98 core is based on a 65nm process versus 80nm process used in earlier 8400GS graphics cards. Also CoreAVC costs a bit money which I am not willing to pay. One reason I switched to Linux is that I want to pay for only hardware and not software (except for music software

)

twoscoreandfour · Post by **twoscoreandfour** » Wed Apr 22, 2009 4:19 pm

I was not talking about the difference between the difference between old and new 8400gs iterations. I was talking about the difference between PureVideo 2 and PureVideo3. PureVideo version has nothing to do with fab process.

The only significant difference between PureVideo v2 and PureVideo v3 is VC-1 offloading

The 9500gt is a 55nm (G96) card which runs PureVideo2. It is generally considered to be a slight improvement on the 8400/8500 series.