Graphic Cards Card for htpc below 5k for 10bit playback

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6pack

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Card for htpc below 5k

Which is the best htpc card below 5k for playing 1080p 10bit (if possible) movies and series with madvr? madvr seems like a long shot since its too gpu demanding imo.
searching alll online stores and closest is HD5450 gddr5 1gb version for 4.9k. All the 6 series cards are gddr3 versions. Infact all the lower series cards everyone seems to sell just gddr3 and even the products seems to be a notch lesser in performance than what is say sold in other countries. Useless cards like GT610, 620, etc are sold for around 3k here.

The only card I like out of all the cards is the radeon hd7750 gddr5 version. but its almost 7k.
 
I wouldn't. I doubt any of the Fermi 6 series cards could do it and the Kepler 640 is a bit more than 5k. I do remember Chaos mentioning his 6450 was not really up to scratch for MadVR.

The entry level for reasonable madVR performance seems to be the 650/ti and the 7750/7770. I heard from a bird that Asus has a passively cooled 7770 in India, though I am awaiting confirmation. I know they do have a fully passive 640 but not sure if it is marketed here. And the Gigabyte cards, though among the cheapest, are reported to have whiny fans, a complaint I can believe quite readily given the stuff they put in power supplies and motherboards.

In short, nothing really good below 5k. The HD4000 should have enough shader power to keep up at FHD resolution. I run XBMC most times (couch potato mode) so my only experience with madVR is on my laptop screen, I use it to scale SD video to the HD screen and it seems to run OK on my HD3000 and a little bit smoother on the GT540M, but these are hardly demanding tasks and I'm no videophile.
 
the only passively cooled 7 series card i saw was this - ASUS - - ASUS HD7750-DCSL-1GD5
haven't see anyone selling it though.
So it either the palit gt 640 or get a 7750? wont a card like a hd 6670 be ok?

if i remove madvr capability what would you suggest? madvr does give crisp video output. only drawback is it seems to need more & more bandwidth with every new update.
 
I would still stick with 7750 and above for better power efficiency and low thermal footprint over the Radeon 6xxx cards. Frankly, even Intel HD Graphics on the G620 is sufficient for every video task I've thrown at it - though you must bear in mind my largest movie file is a shade over 6GB, and over 95% of what I watch are in 720p, not FHD.

I'm in a different pickle, and that is HDMI compatibility, because the integrated graphics keeps dropping the HDMI connection at random. Numerous cable changes did not help and only after looking at threads on the Intel support forums one realises Intel never made allowances for various HDMI standards coexisting with each other, and never conducted tests on consumer-level equipment (just monitors and stuff) before launching either Ivy or Sandy Bridge graphics. So everyone from basic HD, to HD4000 is affected by this issue.

I was hoping that a discrete card would fix that, but it seems even nV cards aren't immune to a few drops once in a while. Not sure about the AMD cards, but I would love a show of hands from those who have them connected to AVRs and are using it to stream both audio and video into one cable. I think most people here would have it running into monitors, which isn't the same thing.
 
@terence_fdes uses a high end gfx card to stream vids to his led tv i think. dont know if he streams both audio and video at same time in one cable.
 
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6pack said:
terence_fdes uses a high end gfx card to stream vids to his led tv i think. dont know if he streams both audio and video at same time in one cable.
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Chaos Sir has HD 6670 I guess and he said they were able to play MadVR putting a load of 70 % approx on the card. So I guess a 6670 should be enough.
Surprisingly my HD 4000 easily plays everything without breaking sweat.
I guess Terry Sir bought the card because he is in the animation/graphics/imaging kinda industry. You do not need a 660ti to stream high def videos.
But really try to find a passive one, you do not wanna be annoyed because of those whiny fans when enjoying the visual treat :D.
No matter how good a fan is in the start, it will get whiny later on no matter what, yeah except they are Sanyo Denki fans which will never happen.
 
Revisiting this thread again.
The sapphire hd6670 1GB gddr5 version is available at flipkart at 5.2k. Is this a good buy now? The newer cards like 7750 are pcie3 ver and not backwards compatible with older pcie 1.x ver mobos
according to a reviewer on that page.
Is this true? My htpc has 1.0v pcie slot.
 
Update : got it for 4767 from flipkart. Got ten percent discount on electronics. And to think its selling on Ebay for 6 to 6.5k. lolz.:p
 
sorry for nOOb qs but how is the video quality from such a setup (htpc/gfx card etc) compared to a standalone media player such as wdtv live etc?
 
First of all 10 bit h.264 is all CPU - doesn't matter what card you use, none help in accelerating it.

Second - for perfect madvr playback of 1080p60 or higher, you need atleast a 7750/GT640. For 1080p/24, a 6570 or higher will do.

I use a sapphire 6570 overclocked to 800MHz and it peaks at around 75-80% GPU usage for jinc 3tap with anti ringing filter so its pretty close to the limits. Its butter smooth with 1 frame drop every 6 hours - i.e. zero frame drop in a normal length movie.

Also this is with quicksync decoding. The decoder on the GPU is not used. If the decoder on the GPU is used, it might end up with even higher gpu usage/dropped frames.

@filmguy : Video quality of media players is utter crap compared to an HTPC. Had an xtreamer before and then moved to an HTPC simply because of poor picture quality from the media player. Especially SD scaling on a media player is terrible.
 
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Oh didn't know that only CPU is used for Hi10p playback. I saw a setting in MPC about 10 bit output in presentation settings. If I select that, it always gave error of card does not support 10bit or something like that. So I thought that maybe even graphics card has some role in this.

Edit- if I don't have quick sync, then what should I use to decode the playback? EVR-CP is slow and drops lots of frames in some cases. EVR sync? Any third party software besides Madvr? I'm currently using lav decoders and evrcp.
 
Evr cp or sync have very minor differences and should work without a hitch. If you wish to use evr just use the internal codecs not lav. They are faster. Use lav only for audio passthrough. It should work on any gpu that supports dxva. Madvr is way more power hungry. If you use madvr use dxva copy back in lav video decoder.
 
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Chaos said:
@filmguy : Video quality of media players is utter crap compared to an HTPC. Had an xtreamer before and then moved to an HTPC simply because of poor picture quality from the media player. Especially SD scaling on a media player is terrible.
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wow, ok didnt know that. thats why was wondering abt the inconvenience & cost (equipment & power) of a htpc versus a media player... how much difference in PQ would you put it at for HD movies on a 50" FHD tv (i know its subjective but still). also ballpark figure for a good htpc which is aleast few years future proof?

@6pack sorry for mini-hijack of your thread. didnt want to make a separate one for 2 qs :)
 
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