sreenisatish
Disciple
This post is just about HD video playback and has nothing to do with gaming.
I recently built an HTPC for my dad. It is an AMD system with the 785GM onboard graphics. The 785GM is capable of decoding H.264 and VC-1 and is actually a Radeon HD4200 for the GPU. The motherboard had HDMI and all the perks required for an HTPC.
So, everything worked fine? Well, No.
The fact is, the HD decoding support in ATI card is very limited. I played a couple of videos on Media Player Classic : Home Cinema which has support for DXVA (HD acceleration) on both Nvidia and ATI cards. I was surprised to see DXVA being enabled for some videos while it was disabled for some other videos. The ones in which it was enabled were playing smoothly without any issues. The ones in which it was disabled were lagging badly.
Why? Because ATI cards don't support decoding of all kinds of H.264 encodings. Videos encoded with High@L5 or 5.1 are not supported. Also, any videos with number of ref frames more than 4 are not supported. And, believe me - there are a lot of HD videos out there which are encoded this way.
If you are watching a Blu Ray disc, you will not face any issues because the Blu Ray standard fits right in with what the card supports. But, when it comes to H.264 MKVs, this becomes a big issue especially if you have a weaker CPU (typical for HTPC). Luckily for me, my CPU was able to handle 1080p playback with 13Mpbs bitrate (with about 80% CPU utilization
). I am not sure it will handle higher bitrates though.
I tried a lot of codecs including MPC video decoder, Arcsoft Video decoder, Cyberlink video decoder, but none of them played the videos in question properly. I also tried updating the Radeon Catalyst drivers - but nothing worked.
This has been confirmed in multiple online forums. Looks like ATI really doesn't care about HD playback and HTPC builders. Nvidia Cards on the other hand have no such issues and they decode all of the above mentioned videos without any issues (confirmed with my good old 8800GT).
So, if you are planning to build an HTPC, you are better off with an Nvidia card than an ATI card. A basic NVidia card like the GT 210 (Around Rs. 2K) will decode HD videos without making you bang your head on a wall.
I recently built an HTPC for my dad. It is an AMD system with the 785GM onboard graphics. The 785GM is capable of decoding H.264 and VC-1 and is actually a Radeon HD4200 for the GPU. The motherboard had HDMI and all the perks required for an HTPC.
So, everything worked fine? Well, No.
The fact is, the HD decoding support in ATI card is very limited. I played a couple of videos on Media Player Classic : Home Cinema which has support for DXVA (HD acceleration) on both Nvidia and ATI cards. I was surprised to see DXVA being enabled for some videos while it was disabled for some other videos. The ones in which it was enabled were playing smoothly without any issues. The ones in which it was disabled were lagging badly.
Why? Because ATI cards don't support decoding of all kinds of H.264 encodings. Videos encoded with High@L5 or 5.1 are not supported. Also, any videos with number of ref frames more than 4 are not supported. And, believe me - there are a lot of HD videos out there which are encoded this way.
If you are watching a Blu Ray disc, you will not face any issues because the Blu Ray standard fits right in with what the card supports. But, when it comes to H.264 MKVs, this becomes a big issue especially if you have a weaker CPU (typical for HTPC). Luckily for me, my CPU was able to handle 1080p playback with 13Mpbs bitrate (with about 80% CPU utilization
). I am not sure it will handle higher bitrates though.I tried a lot of codecs including MPC video decoder, Arcsoft Video decoder, Cyberlink video decoder, but none of them played the videos in question properly. I also tried updating the Radeon Catalyst drivers - but nothing worked.
This has been confirmed in multiple online forums. Looks like ATI really doesn't care about HD playback and HTPC builders. Nvidia Cards on the other hand have no such issues and they decode all of the above mentioned videos without any issues (confirmed with my good old 8800GT).
So, if you are planning to build an HTPC, you are better off with an Nvidia card than an ATI card. A basic NVidia card like the GT 210 (Around Rs. 2K) will decode HD videos without making you bang your head on a wall.
