AMD Gallium3D Shader Optimizations Yield Big Gains

[brent]

yes, but not for the interesting codes (like h264 or vc1) only mpeg2.

I don't think H.264 with shaders is going to happen. It's a ton more complex than MPEG-1/2 and most older GPUs won't have the computational capabilities to make this work realtime. It just wouldn't be useful in most scenarios.

[smitty3268]

I don't think H.264 with shaders is going to happen. It's a ton more complex than MPEG-1/2 and most older GPUs won't have the computational capabilities to make this work realtime. It just wouldn't be useful in most scenarios.

Particularly on r5xx and previous hardware. Not going to happen, ever.

For more modern hardware, we might eventually see something where 1 or 2 passes are done on the GPU after the initial decode is finished on the CPU, but we'll see. With UVD and native hardware support on most current GPUs, that's probably not likely to ever get done either.

What older hardware (and newer) could really benefit from is not the actual video decode, but the presentation part of VDPAU. Shader post-processing, such as effects to add/reduce noise, sharpening/smoothing, de-interlacing, that type of stuff.