AMD Radeon VDPAU Video Performance With Gallium3D

When using the R600/RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers with the Mesa 10.3 VDPAU support, the average CPU usage when running MPlayer to playback Big Buck Bunny at 1080p H.264 was just about 1.5%. Using X-Video on the Core i3 Haswell system was about a 5.3% CPU utilization. From the low-end to high-end graphics cards, they could all easily cope with the H.264 1080p video using the AMD UVD engine and there was no real change in the CPU usage.

The GPU temperatures were all about normal across the span of graphics cards. The hottest graphics card was the low-end Radeon HD 5450, which was rather warm due to having a very small passive heatsink.

The system power consumption was in line with expectations for these graphics cards based upon our last power monitoring results during idle and OpenGL testing.

Overall, the Radeon VDPAU support for accelerated video playback is working well. Thanks to Radeon GPUs having dynamic power management on recent kernels and other features coming along well, Radeon graphics cards with VDPAU can serve for a nice open-source HTPC / multimedia PC. If you're looking for the best VDPAU support and OpenGL 4.x features and complete reliability, I'd recommend checking out my NVIDIA VDPAU recommendations.