AMD Radeon HD 5750/5770

[BlackStar]

About the DX11 is useless on Linux, you are not thinking far ahead enough. These capabilities directly affect OpenCL performance and OpenGL capabilities (for future OpenGL versions).

[Apopas]

For me Mplayer decodes pretty fine the 1080p videos with my 8500GT at 20% CPU.
Even Xine with xv doesn't uses over 70% CPU for big back bunny.

[BlackStar]

For me Mplayer decodes pretty fine the 1080p videos with my 8500GT at 20% CPU.
Even Xine with xv doesn't uses over 70% CPU for big back bunny.

What CPU do you have? For me, XBMC decodes 1080p with <10% CPU, but MPlayer crashes very very quickly (does it try to use CPU opcodes that I don't have? No idea). I use an Athlon64 3200+ Venice core (SSE2-capable).

[deanjo]

Nvidia cards can decode HD videos - in theory at least, because I've yet to find a stable program to do that for me (MPlayer crashes like crazy, XBMC loses sync all the time...)

I have been running XBMC with vdpau for a long time now with multiple systems and vdpau cards and haven't had any sync issues at all across many type of video formats. This sounds more like pulseaudio resampling the stream causing sync to go out of whack.

[Apopas]

I have a similar CPU as you. Athlon64@3000+. As I mentioned before Big Back Bunny runs at 20% maximum with vdpau and my crappy vga No crashes or anything.
Never tried XBMC or any other similar app though.

[BlackStar]

I have been running XBMC with vdpau for a long time now with multiple systems and vdpau cards and haven't had any sync issues at all across many type of video formats. This sounds more like pulseaudio resampling the stream causing sync to go out of whack.

Why would Pulse resample a 48KHz stream when the sink is also 48KHz? (spdif out)

To me this looks more like a network buffering issue, since XBMC sometimes decides to stop and buffer some more, fixing the issue. (Unfortunately, this usually happens only after 15-30 minutes of bad playback). MPlayer is better in this regard, but it crashes a lot so that's no solution. Totem works, but HD video causes 100% CPU usage so that's not an option either.

[Panix]

I have a nvidia 9500GT and an Ati 4850. Both play videos fine as long as you don't use Compiz. Turn on Compiz and you lose vsync on videos (which may or may not be an issue for you - I keep Compiz disabled on my nvidia HTPC because of that).

Nvidia cards can decode HD videos - in theory at least, because I've yet to find a stable program to do that for me (MPlayer crashes like crazy, XBMC loses sync all the time...) I haven't tried to enable xvba on my 4850, but I've been able to watch up to 1080p on my 2.66GHz Core 2 so it's not that big of a deal to me.

In short, don't set your expectations too high, but there's no perfect solution at this time. If you can deal with "good enough", both nvidia and ati cards are there.

Oh, I won't have them too high. As long as I see dedication to work on it and don't have to worry about dropped support.

If you disable Compiz, does that mean all of 3D capability is disabled, too?

I guess it's tolerable as long as there is an option you can set to get clear video whether it's using a driver instead of another or modifying a setting.

I only need 720p for now but I guess I should expect 1080p capability for a $200 card.

I was comparing GTX 260 since Nvidia is said to still be good enough and driver updating seems quick and the ATI series of 5770/4890 since they are very close in price and of course, the OSS potential plus if fglrx development has some dedication, there is more than one option which should, in theory, be good.

I like low temps/power consumption too but at the expense of performance, well, maybe, it depends. Video playing without issue is probably *my* priority overall if the choices are comparable or too close to call.

[Panix]

About the DX11 is useless on Linux, you are not thinking far ahead enough. These capabilities directly affect OpenCL performance and OpenGL capabilities (for future OpenGL versions).

Well, one idea might be to get a cheaper DX10 card and then upgrade again later. Video cards are still very much in demand. Probably easy to sell a recent one or recycle it into a '2nd system.' I thought of that but not sure I'll be building a 2nd system any time soon and if it is, it will be a budget system probably not needing a high-end card.

My computer is a Quad Core Q6600 w/ P35 mobo so still with the 775 LGA architecture. I'm not bottlenecking the video card at all, right? It should still be good hardware for a while, eh?

Oh yeah, the size of the 4890 and 5770 are both around 9.5", right? That is also good since my case I upgraded to is an Antec 300 (from Antec Solo). I understand a Nvidia GeForce 260 GTX will also fit but needing organized drive placing.

[deanjo]

Why would Pulse resample a 48KHz stream when the sink is also 48KHz? (spdif out)

Did you change the default pulseaudio default sample rate in the /pulse/daemon.conf? By default pulse resamples to 44.1 IIRC.

[deanjo]

http://linux.die.net/man/5/pulse-daemon.conf

Default Device Settings

Most drivers try to open the audio device with these settings and then fall back to lower settings. The default settings are CD quality: 16bit native endian, 2 channels, 44100 Hz sampling.

default-sample-format= The default sampling format. Specify one of u8, s16le, s16be, float32le, float32be, ulaw, alaw. Depending on the endianess of the CPU the formats s16ne, s16re, float32ne, float32re (for native, resp. reverse endian) are available as aliases. default-sample-rate= The default sample frequency. default-sample-channels The default number of channels.