[MPlayer-users] Re: MPlayer 0.90rc4, radeon 9000, MC, IDCT

[Tobias Diedrich]

D Richard Felker III wrote:

> MPlayer is a plenty fast to play movies on a high-end K6-2. And if
> your box is much slower than that, IT PROBABLY DOES NOT HAVE AGP, in
> which case you can't use one of these silly cards with hardware
> MC+IDCT!

I believe it could be nice for VIAs EPIA boards, the passively cooled Eden
cpu (supposedly, I don't own such a board) is not fast enough to do
realtime MPEG2 decoding, but the newer boards (EPIA-M) do have hardware
IDCT/MC and AFAIK they are considering writing a (closed source) Xmc
driver.
Also, even if the only benefit were lower cpu usage, that might be a
good thing if your fans are temperature controlled and the cpu
utilization difference is big enough to make a temperature difference. :-)
(Granted, on my Athlon XP it won't make a difference, however on my old
Celeron 433, which was too slow to play mpeg2 at least with quite old
versions of mplayer, it would)

> copying the picture back from the video card to system mem would be
> 10x slower than just doing the MC and IDCT in system mem to begin
> with, since reading from video mem is prohibitively slow. This is one
> of the main reasons hardware MC+IDCT is stupid.

I believe this is only true for processor read accesses to video memory.
If you program the GFX chip to do the transfer for you it should not
have that much of an impact AFAICS. Of course you would need drivers
that would actually allow you to do that (vidix extension, anyone?)...

-- 
Tobias								PGP: 0x9AC7E0BC
This mail is made of 100% recycled bits
Now playing: Kato Tokiko: Studio Ghibli Songs - Toki niwa Mukashi no Hanashi o
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