htpc pcie card needed

[droidhacker]

Just to make one thing clear.... my X2-4800 is on a socket 939, so just plain old DDR (not even DDR2). The memory speed won't have any significant impact on video decoding since you're dealing with a stream that is nice and predictable and far far lower than what the memory can handle.

[acreda]

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Your mother in law actually picked a very good mainboard for the purpose (too good, actually), even if it was just by luck. Throw in a low end X3 or X4 and you'll even be able to decode any downloaded 1080p content in software EASILY. I use an X2-4800 (2.4 GHz) in my HTPC and haven't found anything that it can't deal with "good enough" in software alone.

Really, DON'T WORRY TOO MUCH about it. It'll do the job you want it to do, even with the OPEN SOURCE radeon driver. With the blob, you may even get some UVD happening.

And remember: the cost of adding on a discrete video card will be MORE than the cost of a CPU capable of handling the work you want in software. You can get a decent X3 for ~$50 US. A discrete graphics card that is in ANY way better than the IGP you've got will DEFINITELY cost MORE than $50 US. Also, you may be able to unlock the 4th core in an X3, so $50 might get you a mediocre X4.

I do understand, i may have pointed my mum in law to a board that had 785G in regards to the board quality. at the moment it is runing with a AM3 Athlon II X2 @ 2.9Mhz - it has a good PSU and AC CPU fan on it so I would imagine i could wind some more speed out of it, but looking at the CPU load with mesa classic and fglrx the CPU didnt seem to be straining - may do that tonight as the Discrete card hasnt been shipped yet...

Please dont think i am crapping on ATI, im very happy with my HD4830 and currently usign mesa classic playing UT2004. it just the first time iv needed to decode anything.

[Dandel]

Just to make one thing clear.... my X2-4800 is on a socket 939, so just plain old DDR (not even DDR2). The memory speed won't have any significant impact on video decoding since you're dealing with a stream that is nice and predictable and far far lower than what the memory can handle.

I know what you mean, although, i had a much slower cpu than the athlon 64x2 4800... Anyways, the ddr systems tend to have a lot more problems with 1920x1080 streams then 1280x720 streams.

I do understand, i may have pointed my mum in law to a board that had 785G in regards to the board quality. at the moment it is runing with a AM3 Athlon II X2 @ 2.9Mhz - it has a good PSU and AC CPU fan on it so I would imagine i could wind some more speed out of it, but looking at the CPU load with mesa classic and fglrx the CPU didnt seem to be straining - may do that tonight as the Discrete card hasnt been shipped yet...

Please dont think i am crapping on ATI, im very happy with my HD4830 and currently usign mesa classic playing UT2004. it just the first time iv needed to decode anything.

The two systems have enough power to handle the highest levels of hd content. The main suggestion i have is keep the system on the fglrx driver, and if you should reinstall, use the onboard card until you get the closed source driver installed before trying the hd5000 series. Also, the Athlon II x2 should handle any video with software decoding, also see my previous post about installing the xbmc subversion release.

[droidhacker]

Make sure that you're using a MULTI-THREADED video decoder.

[PGHammer]

HD5xxx (Evergreen) and X

As the local ati representative keeps saying... XVBA on desktop has not even officially ben released yet, so don't complain yet about video accelerated decoding. Also, your mixing up closed source and open source drivers. The closed source takes a little longer to load because your getting a lot more features out of it.



HD 5000 works on linux just fine. It's just a pain to use with certain kernels because of the lack of support in kernel.

Ubuntu 10.10 - No special steps (expected Final release 10/27)
Ubuntu 10.04 - Requires xforce vesa parameter or safemode graphics until the fglrx driver is set, but once that is done it's golden.



The number of stream processors really does not matter.... I would simply just simply suggest the HD5000 series as a good baseline for long term since it supports dx11 class graphics.




I do agree, run the closed source drivers. Anyways, i suggest giving xbmc a shot. Use the xbmc-ppa-svn branch and you should be fine...

https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc-svn/+archive/ppa

also, to keep the drivers up to date with some ease, look at the Ubuntu-x-swat ppa for handling the support of the fglrx driver updates.

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates

Yet again, mixing things up... the driver for video card based accelerated decoding is not even officially released on ati. as for most of the other stuff.... Your mixing up Closed source and open source. The open source drivers have not progressed far enough to have vaapi decoding.


and on a final note (and a short rant)... I've been using ati on linux for years, and i will state this... You can decode the video all you want on cpu, it's just a matter of having enough processing power. A 720p HD video (1280x720) easily be handled on an on ddr based athlon 64x2 3800+ with a radeon x1900gt. The same video can also work on the Turion (Dual core 2ghz) laptop with radeon 3100 graphics and ddr memory. As for really high end video, namely HD 1080p (1920x1080), I don't know for certain if which chips can handle that, however I find my desktop at with an Athlon IIx4 (2.8ghz, but decodes just fine at 800mhz) is not very bad, although I'm using ddr3 memory. With this said, you should not complain about being unable to decode HD content.

The issue right now (with Penguinista Catalysta, AKA closed-source AMD Linux drivers) is more X than kernel-related (specifically, X 1.9); however, that version of X is only in test/development versions of Linux (no shipping/normal-use *desktop* distribution is using it). The kernel issue is more that some distributions never moved away from 2.6.32 (notably Fedora); if you are okay with moving to a 2.6.35 kernel (which is an option even for Fedora) you can use the closed-source 10.6 through 10.8s, which support HD5xxx from end to end (including several HTPC-style GPUs, such as HD54xx/HD55xx).

Yes; when openSuSE 11.3 shipped, you needed a patch to run Catalyst 10.7s - however, this was fixed in an update for openSuSE 11.3 (further, 10.8 does not have that issue). Canonical, as usual, has a custom Catalyst for 'buntu (which I use with my HD5450 without issues).

As long as you don't go bleeding-edge with X, and go with a relatively-modern kernel, you're fine with HD5xxx and closed-source.