NVIDIA GeForce GT 520

[Paul Frederick]

What could give me the idea?

My first response was intentionally tempured. However, it seems that's not going to work. Please don't tell me about assumptions when you A) assumed that I hadn't installed the latest driver (or at least tried it) B) compared MPEG-4 quality video with your MPEG/MPEG2 card and C) Get didn't have hardware that is at least within the same generation as this discussion. Your card isn't even within the same binary driver package as a 520.

The 520 is now the 4th in a group of HTPC's all with the same MB's, CPU's, RAM, and software. 3 of the 4 have the same video card and they play back video just fine. What would give you the idea that I could possibly screw up the driver install just on the 520 when it's done using Nvidia's installer not a tarball? It's not like I could intervene in the installation process and disable video acceleration before install. Nvidia asks you all of three questions. Do you accept the TOS? Are you at run level 3? And do you want to back up your Xorg config? That's it. You can't even enable resolutions above VESA without the driver being enabled and supported within the driver. If the GPU ID isn't in the driver you get no acceleration of any kind and doubtful you'll get HDMI audio. I would have noticed it long before XBMC fired up.

One of the first clues was the fact that I was using BR content likely hooked up to a HDTV using HDMI. The likelyhood of me using resolutions through a digital output above that of VESA, with HDMI audio intact but no video acceleration but with a GPU accelerated desktop should have at least made you think twice. Have you ever played back Blu-Ray titles on an Athlon X2 without video accelleration? The experiecne is far worse than if you had the 520 in toe. There are many factors involved within video playback the least of which is the bitrate of the video. You asked none of these questions. Hell, I could have been playing back Hi-10P content for all you knew which no video card supports at all.

The 520 is likely worse off than the 430 because the 520 has half the bandwidth and half the shader count than the 430 does. If you don't have anything else going on and you are just decoding video then you won't notice. However, when you turn on post processing. Most of these effects lay outside of the of video decode unit and are done by the shaders. These are (depending on the card) color overlay, deinterlacing, noise reduction, etc. This problem exists for cards like the 210 as well. There are more than a couple of threads that make the recommendation to at least move one model up from Nvidia's lowest (this goes for AMD as well) precisely because of these limitations. Deinterlacing of 1080 content ain't no joke and there are some streams recorded off of your cable provider that are interlaced. The higher the resolution the more shaders / the higher clockrate you are going to need to implement any post processing without dropping frames.

If you fire up mplayer (in something else than Unity) you'll likely be fine. The problem is that video isn't the only thing that's being accelerated. Throw in compiz and you've got even slower performance than KDE, GS, or even Windows.

It could be that you bring up Compiz and Unity, which are Ubuntu things. I run Debian and know the Nvidia installer isn't the best way to go on a dpkg based system. Anywho, I just ordered a GT 520 so in a little while I won't have to speculate. By sometime next week I should know for sure.

[kaczu]

Wow...OK

There are at least 3 different drivers that work with Nvidia cards in Linux. So far your logic that just because you were getting sound with your hdmi hasn't told me anything about which driver you are using. That it outside my experience as I never use sound over hdmi.

pfred1@spot:~$ glxinfo


server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation


That is what the Nvidia binary driver looks like. The 520 is in all likelihood a POS and I have heard plenty of bad things about Compiz too. Still, I think you've a better chance with it than what I am using.

My first response was intentionally tempured. However, it seems that's not going to work. Please don't tell me about assumptions when you A) assumed that I hadn't installed the latest driver (or at least tried it) B) compared MPEG-4 quality video with your MPEG/MPEG2 card and C) Get didn't have hardware that is at least within the same generation as this discussion. Your card isn't even within the same binary driver package as a 520.

The 520 is now the 4th in a group of HTPC's all with the same MB's, CPU's, RAM, and software. 3 of the 4 have the same video card and they play back video just fine. What would give you the idea that I could possibly screw up the driver install just on the 520 when it's done using Nvidia's installer not a tarball? It's not like I could intervene in the installation process and disable video acceleration before install. Nvidia asks you all of three questions. Do you accept the TOS? Are you at run level 3? And do you want to back up your Xorg config? That's it. You can't even enable resolutions above VESA without the driver being enabled and supported within the driver. If the GPU ID isn't in the driver you get no acceleration of any kind and doubtful you'll get HDMI audio. I would have noticed it long before XBMC fired up.

One of the first clues was the fact that I was using BR content likely hooked up to a HDTV using HDMI. The likelyhood of me using resolutions through a digital output above that of VESA, with HDMI audio intact but no video acceleration but with a GPU accelerated desktop should have at least made you think twice. Have you ever played back Blu-Ray titles on an Athlon X2 without video accelleration? The experiecne is far worse than if you had the 520 in toe. There are many factors involved within video playback the least of which is the bitrate of the video. You asked none of these questions. Hell, I could have been playing back Hi-10P content for all you knew which no video card supports at all.

The 520 is likely worse off than the 430 because the 520 has half the bandwidth and half the shader count than the 430 does. If you don't have anything else going on and you are just decoding video then you won't notice. However, when you turn on post processing. Most of these effects lay outside of the of video decode unit and are done by the shaders. These are (depending on the card) color overlay, deinterlacing, noise reduction, etc. This problem exists for cards like the 210 as well. There are more than a couple of threads that make the recommendation to at least move one model up from Nvidia's lowest (this goes for AMD as well) precisely because of these limitations. Deinterlacing of 1080 content ain't no joke and there are some streams recorded off of your cable provider that are interlaced. The higher the resolution the more shaders / the higher clockrate you are going to need to implement any post processing without dropping frames.

If you fire up mplayer (in something else than Unity) you'll likely be fine. The problem is that video isn't the only thing that's being accelerated. Throw in compiz and you've got even slower performance than KDE, GS, or even Windows.

[Paul Frederick]

One thing I like about the 520

In comparing the 520 with the 430 card, does it matter which version of the 430 it is? It looks like there's 3 different versions of the 430 or are the claims that the 430 is better applicable for all?

Which would you choose for a HTPC? All the 430 cards are 60W and the 520 is 30W, though. The 430 has either 64-bit or 128-bit memory bus but then most of them seem to be 1GB varieties and shop places list them as 128-bit but I thought they were 64.

The 520 sure is low wattage. That would lend itself better to passive cooling. The 430 is twice the Watts, which is still on the lower end of the middle of the spectrum as far as GPU power consumption goes. There can be a correlation between power consumption and performance with graphics cards. Apparently you don't get nothing for nothing even in the virtual world.

It makes sense though because I believe it is during state changes that the most power is consumed. So the more bits flipping on and off the more energy is required.

It is interesting to note that the 530 is almost double the 520 in just about every respect. What does seem to hamstring the 520 is it's memory bus bandwidth. All 64 bit cards lack in the performance area. Memory bandwidth is one of my red flags when looking at the plethora of video adapters on the market today. The power some of these devices can consume is not to be overlooked anymore though either. Not unless you have one of those hair drier power supplies. You know, like a Conair 1000 Watt model.

[Kano]

@Paul Frederick

Most likely this is the correct mediainfo output for your file:

http://www.mavvy.net/sites/default/files/ElephantsDream[DivX7].txt

But you can certainly run mediainfo on your own as well on it. Youtube uses normally below 10 mbps average as well, but that has got nothing to do with "real" bd movies. Your example is something that could be encoded very efficiently, no fast motions, similar colors, no noise. I would not compare that to a bd action movie

[Panix]

In comparing the 520 with the 430 card, does it matter which version of the 430 it is? It looks like there's 3 different versions of the 430 or are the claims that the 430 is better applicable for all?

Which would you choose for a HTPC? All the 430 cards are 60W and the 520 is 30W, though. The 430 has either 64-bit or 128-bit memory bus but then most of them seem to be 1GB varieties and shop places list them as 128-bit but I thought they were 64.

[Paul Frederick]

Your assumptions are baseless

It actually WASN'T a driver problem. The driver I used did in fact have support for the card. Hell if it wasn't I would have been stuck at VESA modes and I doubt the HDMI audio would have been there. BTW the card was used AGAIN this time with Ubuntu 11.10. Still the same problem.

I actually ended up finding what was causing this, largely because even after using the card with the latest version of Ubuntu I still had problems. Remember the benchmarks not too long ago regarding compiz? Well compiz was killing the performance (again the 430 doesn't have this problem) so even though I thought compiz was off, it wasn't. I had to completely remove it actually I uninstalled the ubuntu-desktop package entirely and went with Xfce. Bingo bango there was enough performance for decent video playback. Not unbelievable, but much better than it was. It was in fact usable. It's safe to say that it could be used for HD playback. However, it's just enough ...no more. There are still some very very rare cases where there's a dropped frame but it's largely not noticeable.

I would still keep my recommendation that since the price of the 520 is pretty damn close to a 430 I would take the 430 over it any day of the week. The 430 is an older card, but it is in fact more powerful.

There are at least 3 different drivers that work with Nvidia cards in Linux. So far your logic that just because you were getting sound with your hdmi hasn't told me anything about which driver you are using. That it outside my experience as I never use sound over hdmi.

pfred1@spot:~$ glxinfo


server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation


That is what the Nvidia binary driver looks like. The 520 is in all likelihood a POS and I have heard plenty of bad things about Compiz too. Still, I think you've a better chance with it than what I am using.

[Paul Frederick]

Care to let me in on the joke?

Considering a Geforce 2 can't accelerate H264/MPEG4 it would have been best if nothing was said at all. Maybe it was a joke though. Either way, there it is. Yes XBMC is my favorite as well.

I am failing to see the humor in it.

[Paul Frederick]

A Joke?

If you dont want do decode 1080p50/60 (possible with some hd cams, but usually 1080i is default there, ) then a simple geforce 210 would be enough as well, but the price difference is getting smaller. The gt 520 is no gaming card, those are gts 550/gtx 560 and up. I dont get the point with compiz, i only use kde but never saw those performance issues even with a simple geforce 405 (rebranded 210). Maybe u does somethig wrong The mplayer example must be a joke as the test file is encoded at a very low bitrate. This can not be compared to max 40 mbit full hd which are within bd spec (8 mbit are reserved for audio). The best player currently is xbmc for those formats. vlc could use vdpau via a wrapper but this works very inefficiently. mplayer is ok with vc vdpau overrides, but with simple iso image support xbmc is my favorite.

Before you go calling it a joke you could try to download the file and play it yourself. I gave enough information so you can even get the correct one. Just in case I didn't:

$ md5sum "ElephantsDream[DivX7].mkv"
f11eb0df02f2af8ea06db2cccfae1d28 ElephantsDream[DivX7].mkv

[kaczu]

The mplayer example must be a joke as the test file is encoded at a very low bitrate. This can not be compared to max 40 mbit full hd which are within bd spec (8 mbit are reserved for audio). The best player currently is xbmc for those formats. vlc could use vdpau via a wrapper but this works very inefficiently. mplayer is ok with vc vdpau overrides, but with simple iso image support xbmc is my favorite.

Considering a Geforce 2 can't accelerate H264/MPEG4 it would have been best if nothing was said at all. Maybe it was a joke though. Either way, there it is. Yes XBMC is my favorite as well.

[Kano]

If you dont want do decode 1080p50/60 (possible with some hd cams, but usually 1080i is default there, ) then a simple geforce 210 would be enough as well, but the price difference is getting smaller. The gt 520 is no gaming card, those are gts 550/gtx 560 and up. I dont get the point with compiz, i only use kde but never saw those performance issues even with a simple geforce 405 (rebranded 210). Maybe u does somethig wrong The mplayer example must be a joke as the test file is encoded at a very low bitrate. This can not be compared to max 40 mbit full hd which are within bd spec (8 mbit are reserved for audio). The best player currently is xbmc for those formats. vlc could use vdpau via a wrapper but this works very inefficiently. mplayer is ok with vc vdpau overrides, but with simple iso image support xbmc is my favorite.