AMD Releases UVD Video Decode Support For R600 GPUs

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Find me an AMD GPU for $10 that's newer than a Radeon HD 2400 PRO, and I may be interested in your proposal to buy newer hardware.

Also, who cares what CPU you'd buy? If I was going to buy some soft drink, I'd go for Pepsi



I have an older desktop with a Radeon HD 2400 PRO that could use some VDPAU; I run Plex Home Theater on it. Although I'm interested in:



So does that mean this news doesn't apply to a 2400? I assume the 2400 and 2400 PRO are the same?

It's economic suicide to cater to a person whose constrained their GPU budget at your wishes. You're an edge case and one that is not reasonable to engage.

[dungeon]

Happy 30 years ATi

http://www.twitch.tv/amd/c/4970656

Maybe this UVD support is also gift for anniversary

[dungeon]

The last makes me really really angry.

What? First there is no longer a fglrx Support and we have to use the foss-radeon driver and now this uncompleate foss driver is legacy too now?

That only means old UVD is limited, and they can't avoid hardware limitation or maybe software limitation, etc:

MPEG2 only with shaders and no support for interlacing on R6xx style UVD

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2014-August/066556.html

In practice i guess that means you can use for example:

mpv --hwdec=vdpau --vo=vdpau

but not:

mpv --hwdec=vdpau --vo=opengl

[schmidtbag]

This is such great news! The to do list keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller!

Now, if only they would prioritize Crossfire support and put together some sort of easy to use, updated configuration GUI, this driver would be perfect!

I too would appreciate crossfire support - there are a couple games I have in Steam where the extra grunt from my 2nd GPU would make them play at full detail and full frame rate. With some of these games, they already play at/near full frame rate and full detail under Windows with only 1 GPU. But, complete openCL support appears to be just around the corner so at the very least I can put use to my 2nd GPU with that while doing other tasks. Might be helpful during the winter months when I could use the extra heat while putting good use to the power I use.


@Nuc!eoN
I understand your frustration, but in hindsight buying a DX10/OGL3 card in 2009 for linux purposes was a bad call. GPU drivers tend to be grouped by API generation, so since DX11 and OGL4 were just around the corner (actually weren't both released in 2009?), buying hardware supporting last-generation technology is always bound to get ditched relatively soon. I do feel that when AMD decided to categorize the HD4000 series as legacy, it was a little too soon, but, R600 goes all the way back to 2006.

So the moral of the story is if you're going to buy a GPU and expect long-term results, don't buy the last generation of the current architecture. As an owner of two HD5750s, there's a good chance that DX12 and OGL-Next won't work on my hardware. Support for my hardware on Catalyst is most likely going to be dropped shortly after AMD releases their first GPU with official DX12 and OGL-Next support (official meaning that even the boxes will label it). Support for the R600 open source drivers is already slowing down (compared to Radeon SI). The annoying part is by the time I feel the need to upgrade my GPUs, everything I'll have wanted out of the open source drivers will be completed.

[dungeon]

I do feel that when AMD decided to categorize the HD4000 series as legacy, it was a little too soon, but, R600 goes all the way back to 2006.

It was maded legacy right at the time, because if we looked back 2006., 2009. and 2012. are years when some chips goes into legacy, so 3 years in between .

That way i also expect somewhere next year (maybe even in early spring) HD5xxx/HD6xxx will be also legacy and only GCN+ supported with the fglrx driver, etc... so according to the history if that does not happen next year i will be surprised .

[Nille_kungen]

\o/ thanks a lot, haven't tried it yet but thanks

[Luke]

Not everyone can spend $200 on video cards

AMD and other devs, if developing for older hardware does not help support new hardware then please don't waste your time writing code for old hardware. New and newer hardware has more users and new hardware is also faster/better. Get over it and sell your old hardware and buy new hardware (200$ extra per 3years is nothing). Intel has great open source drivers BTW, they even have a team called The Intel Open Source Technology Center. Unfortunately they don't have AM/NV like graphics cards but regarding CPU I'd buy Intel.

I've never ONCE had a video card that expensive, and never will as I simply don't have that kind of money to spend. I do regard 1080p video as desktop-only on my budget, as they can play it in CPU if theyhave more than one core, or on bottom-barrel video cards. The biggest hassle, don't know if this will help it or not, is that video cards supporting an open driver, open VDPAU, and also the ancient AGP interface for getting really old junk to play 1080p are a very small subset. There are some small 9000 series NVIDIA cards (available cheap and used) that can do it with older blobs, but for AMD/open drivers you would be looking at buying a new $50 HD6450 with the legacy PCI interface. I also don't know if the early P4 can handle the copy jobs to play 1080p over PCI, but given that a Pentium II with AGP could supposedly play 1080p it on those early VDPAU Nvidia cards I would imagine it would work. Will try it if one of the HD6450 PCI cards ever comes my way, I've set up several machines that played 1080p easily with Pentium 4 Prescott or AMD Athlon 64 and PCI-e with VDPAU supporting cards. They can't play anything bigger than 360p in the browser but can play anything supported by vdpau in mplayer and its forks! Seriously nice to see more video cards getting open video decoding drivers to make full use of their hardware, THANKS AMD.

[Nille]

They also made clear that there will be no Windows 8 support.

Thats not a Problem, because he use the Win7 WDDM Driver. My HD3850 and HD 3650M works without a Problem under Windows 8.1. I bet, my ATI Radeon 9700 AGP Card can still work with the Windows Vista Beta Driver.

[Kano]

It's fine that mplayer could use vdpau but without xbmc support it is really poor. I really would like to know if the needed feature could be emulated.

[Nille]

xbmc support it is really poor.

Hardware Decoding is xmbc is poor on windows too. Since XBMC 13 your Hardware Decoder must decode 2 streams at the same time otherwise the gui freeze and you hear only the sound (the bug is well know since the beginning) buts it was ignored because a release is more important.

The problem is simple (they create a new decoder before close the old one)

It would not surprise me if the xbmc do the same on linux, but the hardware that can only decode on stream at the same time was not supported since now