ATI vs nVidia fanless cards for mkv hardware acceleration

[poohbear]

Do all the new nvidia cards these days support hardware mkv acceleration? It's been a while since my last upgrade. Was considering the following fanless ATI cards for my two new Dell Inspiron 545 systems .. but now I'm hearing nVidia can do mkv also with CUDA so I'm not sure which to choose.


MSI Radeon HD 4350 Passive 600MHZ 512MB 1.0GHZ DDR2 PCIe HDMI DVI VGA Video Card <-- wonder if this will fit in the case, the heatsink looks high
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php? ... omoid=1192

ASUS Radeon HD 4350 Silent 600MHZ 512MB DDR2 800MHZ PCI-E DVI VGA HDMI Low Profile Video Card <-- was thinking of purchasing this one
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php? ... omoid=1192

SAPPHIRE HD4670 ULTIMATE 512M DDR3 HDMI/DVI-I/VGA PCIE Lite Retail (HD4670/512) <-- and this one for my system, hope it fits
http://www.infonec.com/site/main.php?mo ... &id=442831

[sandy keelow]

Do all the new nvidia cards these days support hardware mkv acceleration?

There is no such thing as an mkv accelerating video card, as mkv is a container format and not a video codec... I guess what you want to talk about is H264 acceleration when the stream is contained in mkv ?

[lodestar]

CUDA can make a big difference because it takes so much load off the CPU e.g. this comment by a CUDA/CoreAVC user "....On 1080p mkv content, I would pretty much be at 100% CPU usage all the time, with heavy stuttering, and dropped frames by the boat load. With the new CoreAVC (and new nvidia drivers), I can now watch 1080p content with 20% CPU usage....".

Using CUDA will obviously require an nVidia card, and the latest drivers are always a good idea because CUDA is being constantly updated. Here in the UK for a fanless card I would probably look at something like this http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/256MB-Ga ... L-DVI-HDTV.

[nutball]

CUDA can make a big difference because it takes so much load off the CPU e.g. this comment by a CUDA/CoreAVC user "....On 1080p mkv content, I would pretty much be at 100% CPU usage all the time, with heavy stuttering, and dropped frames by the boat load. With the new CoreAVC (and new nvidia drivers), I can now watch 1080p content with 20% CPU usage....".

Sure, but CUDA + CoreAVC isn't the only combination that'll give these results - the HD decode engines in recent NV and ATI GPUs can yield the same benefit if you can ween yourself off CoreAVC (eg. use the MPC-HC codecs, or the codecs from PowerDVD or whatever the other one is).

It would be interesting to know what the power consumption is when decoding video using CUDA, compared to using the dedicated decode engines.

[poohbear]

Do all the new nvidia cards these days support hardware mkv acceleration?

There is no such thing as an mkv accelerating video card, as mkv is a container format and not a video codec... I guess what you want to talk about is H264 acceleration when the stream is contained in mkv ?

I thought I read before that the newer ATI cards support mkv meaning no need to install video codec before playing .mkv movies ... is this not the case? Did I read it wrong?

[nutball]

There was some ATI PR to that effect floating around some months ago (maybe it was a year ago now) but as I recall on deeper inspection it turned out not to be what it appeared from the headlines. PR spin in other words.

[ryboto]

I thought I read before that the newer ATI cards support mkv meaning no need to install video codec before playing .mkv movies ... is this not the case? Did I read it wrong?

You're correct, if the video player supports it, and you don't have any other codecs for h.264 content installed that will take priority, it will use the card to stream. If the film wasn't encoded correctly, you can have audio-syncing problems though.

[sampo]

Check out DXVA support in MPC Home Cinema.

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/DXVASupport.html

Even the cheapest Radeon HD* card will be enough for basic decoding, NVidia doesn't support VC-1.

[poohbear]

I thought I read before that the newer ATI cards support mkv meaning no need to install video codec before playing .mkv movies ... is this not the case? Did I read it wrong?

You're correct, if the video player supports it, and you don't have any other codecs for h.264 content installed that will take priority, it will use the card to stream. If the film wasn't encoded correctly, you can have audio-syncing problems though.

So you mean most ATI cards nowadays can play mkv without software codecs? What about nVidia? If I decide to go with CUDA, which is the best fanless nVidia card?

[nutball]

So you mean most ATI cards nowadays can play mkv without software codecs? What about nVidia? If I decide to go with CUDA, which is the best fanless nVidia card?

There seems to be some cross-talk in the terminology going on here.

You always need an additional codec to play a movie in an format not natively understood by windows. It's just a question of where that codec comes from and what it can do.

That codec either uses the CPU for everything (eg. CoreAVC, the ffdshow one) or it can make use of some of the decode engine hardware on the GPU to reduce CPU load. The codecs I'm aware of that fall into the latter category are those from MPC-HC, Cyberlink PowerDVD and ArcSoft TotalTheatre thingy (or whatever it's called these days). MPC-HC is free, Cyberlink and Arcsoft cost money.

The MPC-HC media player ships with the codecs built-in, though you can get standalone versions of them. The Cyberlink and Arcsoft packages install external packages, but the result in all three cases is the same - they can use the GPU hardware to assist decoding of correctly encoded H.264 movies.

MPC-HC, Cyberlink and Arcsoft all work with both ATI and NVIDIA cards, though as noted above MPC-HC can't play VC-1 content on NVIDIA GPUs (Cyberlink and Arcsoft can *I think*, I may be wrong).

What you can't do is the following:

- install ATI card
- vanilla install of XP or Vista
- install Haali Media Splitter
- expect x264-encoded movies in a MKV to play in Windows Media Player, or MediaPortal, or VMC, etc. with hardware assist

or if you can it'll be because ATI are shipping a codec with the drivers (which is news to me!).

The CoreAVC + CUDA claim is interesting, the problem being that CUDA uses the main part of the GPU engine to do its compute, ie. the bit that uses lots of power. The h/w video decode engines hardly use any power at all.

[Resiroth]

Nvidia's CUDA and ati's STREAM are not related to video playback I believe. They both decode 1080p without using much of the CPU. Nvidia's CUDA is used in things like badaboom for ultra-fast video conversion and folding @ home.

ATI's stream tries to be CUDA but fails...horribly. I've owned both ati and nvidia and I can honestly say STREAM is worthless. Nvidia's CUDA isn't brilliant either, but at least it can fold well and convert videos quickly. A 4870 will fold slower than a 9600GT and it can't convert video using the GPU. They have a converter that tries to do it but it has tons of issues like artifacts.