The Ultimate Htpc Graphics Card?

[ocujos]

Nvidia has released new 8xxx series GPU's.

According to this review Nvidia appears to have a winning HTPC solution.

Some highlights from the article:

To help show how the new video engine dramatically reduces CPU utilization, NVIDIA provided Legit Reviews with a couple slides that show CPU Utilization when doing H.264 decoding with actual Blu-Ray and HD DVD movies on an Intel Pentium 4 531 Processor with an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro versus the NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT and then with nothing more than the CPU. When using the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro and the CPU the performance tests showed that 100% of the work was done by the CPU. With the NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT it shows the CPU only helping out with ~30-45% of the work, while the GPU handled the rest.

And thanks to Owen we know how good the video quality is on those new GPU's is

[50mxe20]

Price?

$US270, so $AUD500??

[hired goon]

G'day,

I've been waiting for the 8600GT for my HTPC (apparently the Gigabyte 8600GT is passively cooled, but I haven't seen this one available yet).

The 8600GT 256MB cards are around $200 according to staticice. Not too bad, considering the 7600GT is around $150. I've only got a 720p display so a 7600GT is prolly sufficient but for $50 more I may as well go the 8600GT.

Dunno how much better the 8600GT is compared to the 7600GT, or how it compares to 8800 for HTPC work. Hopefully some reviews will be forthcoming.

--Geoff

[Ajax9000]

I've been waiting for the 8600GT for my HTPC (apparently the Gigabyte 8600GT is passively cooled, but I haven't seen this one available yet).

...--Geoff

Do you want HDCP with that? It appears that the Gigabyte 8600GT doesn't have HDCP, but it's passively cooled 8500GT does (and is listing at $179 on staticice). Indeed, at the moment there are nearly as many 8500GT's with HDCP as there are 8600GT's with HDCP.

IF the 8500GT lives up to Nvidia's claims of 100% CPU offload AND do HD Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing, Inverse Telecine, and Bad Edit Correction -- the three areas most mid/low 7xxx cards struggle, then this looks like the perfect card for my long-delayed HTPC build.

Adrian

[hired goon]

G'day,

Do you want HDCP with that? It appears that the Gigabyte 8600GT doesn't have HDCP, but it's passively cooled 8500GT does (and is listing at $179 on staticice).

Yeah, I guess I'll need HDCP support if I ever want to install a HD-DVD or BlueRay player in my HTPC, right? (although I dunno if the HDMI input on my Sony panel is HDCP enabled either).

So maybe I'll be getting a pasively-cooled 8500GT instead of a passively-cooled 8600GT. More research required.

--Geoff

[Ajax9000]

... More research required.

--Geoff

And PureVideo HD benchmarks! :-)

Adrian

[murrayt]

hired goon

I'va happily run Edit: PDVD7.3 and an Xbox drive to play back DVD-HD movies.

It seems to work fine, and I use an ASUS 7600GT and Samsung monitor which is not HDCP compliant

[hired goon]

G'day,

I'va happily run PVD7.3 and an Xbox drive to play back DVD-HD movies.

It seems to work fine, and I use an ASUS 7600GT and Samsung monitor which is not HDCP compliant

Interesting ... I've been wondering if I should pick up the Xbox HD-DVD drive (I've read that it can be recognized by XP, but I dunno what software would actually play the content edit: I guess "PVD 7.3" is "PowerDVD 7.3" -- I thought you were talking about PureVideo), but I guess it is still a safer option to get a 8xxx card that is HDCP-enabled.

Then again, the 8500GT mentioned above has a different passive cooling system to the 8600GT (heat sink vs "silent pipe"), so that may also be a factor ...

--Geoff

[drsmith]

G'day,

Interesting ... I've been wondering if I should pick up the Xbox HD-DVD drive (I've read that it can be recognized by XP, but I dunno what software would actually play the content), but I guess it is still a safer option to get a 8xxx card that is HDCP-enabled.

Then again, the 8500GT mentioned above has a different passive cooling system to the 8600GT (heat sink vs "silent pipe"), so that may also be a factor ...

--Geoff

I have purchased the Xbox HD-DVD drive and it can be recognised by XP.

Further information can be obtained from the following links;

http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/11/8303/

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=325&a...xpert&pid=3

I downloaded and used the drivers mentioned in the first link and the drive is recognised by XP as a TOSHIBA DVD/HD X807616 USB device. I downloaded the drivers about one month ago and if memory serves me correct is was from a different site to the first link above. If the link in the first site above is no good for obtaining the drivers, try a google search using thdudf.inf.

With the Hong Kong HD-DVD that came with the drive, all the files on the disc are viewable with Windows Explorer and can be copied to a hard drive if disered.

I can't play the Hong Kong movie though, but this is because PowerDVD 7.3 baulks at the ATI X800 graphics card drivers. This is both from the drive itself and from a copy of the King Kong disc on a hard drive, so it's not a HD-DVD drive issue. Playback of SD-DVD's from the drive has been fine.

[SKG]

I have purchased the Xbox HD-DVD drive and it can be recognised by XP.

Further information can be obtained from the following links;

http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/11/8303/

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=325&a...xpert&pid=3

I downloaded and used the drivers mentioned in the first link and the drive is recognised by XP as a TOSHIBA DVD/HD X807616 USB device. I downloaded the drivers about one month ago and if memory serves me correct is was from a different site to the first link above. If the link in the first site above is no good for obtaining the drivers, try a google search using thdudf.inf.

With the Hong Kong HD-DVD that came with the drive, all the files on the disc are viewable with Windows Explorer and can be copied to a hard drive if disered.

I can't play the Hong Kong movie though, but this is because PowerDVD 7.3 baulks at the ATI X800 graphics card drivers. This is both from the drive itself and from a copy of the King Kong disc on a hard drive, so it's not a HD-DVD drive issue. Playback of SD-DVD's from the drive has been fine.

Just download the latest version of ANYDVD and you'll be fine.

I have a Nvidia 7600GT card and Dell 24" and it says they are not HDPC compliant (but they are) so I used Anydvd and Bingo !!

Steve

[Owen]

And PureVideo HD benchmarks! :-)

Adrian

I don’t need a benchmark to tell me that my 8800 is MUCH MUCH better then my 7800 card in every respect except drivers. Even SD content is unbelievable improved.

The aliasing noticeable on true interlaced 576i from my video camera are almost completely absent on the 8800 and the colour resolution of the 8800 is also a big step forward.

It is yet to be seen if the low end 8xxx cards will be up to the task as things like memory bandwidth are dramatically worse then the 8800 cards.

With all the visual enhancements enabled the 8800 GPU appears to be working quite hard playing 1080i, as is evidenced by the amount of heat it generates. The fan is however very quite on my Leadtek card.

[pietro1503559499]

Presumably the 8500GT will work properly with Vista?

[drsmith]

Just download the latest version of ANYDVD and you'll be fine.

I have a Nvidia 7600GT card and Dell 24" and it says they are not HDPC compliant (but they are) so I used Anydvd and Bingo !!

Steve

I used ANYDVD, but to no avail.

With the CPU at one notch below minimum requirements, it's looking a lot like a new PC is required to play this stuff.

I have considered conversion of the EVO files on the disk to MKV, but I am yet to come across a relatively simple means of doing this.

Out of desperation, I might try the ATI X1600 drivers with the X800 card.

[Ata]

According to the avsforum.com thread, the new full avc/h264/vc1 hardware decoding functionality is currently only available with Vista drivers. Windows XP/MCE will get this support by June/July timeframe. This is good to know as I (and no doubt many others) am using MCE with no intention to upgrade.

Hopefully by the time HD acceleration comes to XP there will be a plenty of passively cooled cards to choose from, prices would have stabilized (that is, gone down a bit), and reliable reports on how good the accelleration works outside of NVidia's labs to help with the 8500GT vs 8600GT choice that many will have.

Of course, by that time ATI/AMD R6xx cards will also be out...

This news is big for me as I am on Socket 939 which makes the CPU upgrade quite expensive. Now, for less than the price of a S939 Opteron 165 I will have a complete and a lot less power demanding true HD solution (so no need to upgrade my 350W quiet PSU either).

-- Ata

[Ajax9000]

...

It is yet to be seen if the low end 8xxx cards will be up to the task as things like memory bandwidth are dramatically worse then the 8800 cards.

With all the visual enhancements enabled the 8800 GPU appears to be working quite hard playing 1080i, as is evidenced by the amount of heat it generates. The fan is however very quite on my Leadtek card.

This is where things start getting interesting. DriverHeaven did a decode test under Vista where average CPU load for BD decode dropped 3/4 and HD-DVD more than 1/2 using a 8600GTS.

But ...

The testbed is rather over the top:

Test System:

MSI Geforce 8600 GTS OC

BFG Geforce 8600 GTS OC

Intel Core2 QX6700

Abit IN9 32X-MAX

OCZ DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12

Enermax Galaxy 850w

Benq 16x DVD Writer

LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer

Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive

Auzentech X-Meridian 7.1 Soundcard

Asetek Vapochill

Windows Vista Ultimate

Forceware 158.14

DirectX 9.0c/DirextX10

The QX6700 is a $1130++ CPU with a 130W TDP! The CPU alone costs more than a PS3 so one would hope it did a decent job of decoding. Plus they were using factory OC 8600GTS'.

I want to see a comparison using much more affordable hardware. Such as an E6700 with a 8600GT; or even better an E6600 or E6420 with a 8500GT (optimistic I know :-).

If an E6700 + 8600GT can keep max CPU below 80-90% then you have a combination about AUD$800 cheaper than DriverHeaven used ... and it should be cooler and quieter too.

I don’t need a benchmark to tell me that my 8800 is MUCH MUCH better then my 7800 card in every respect except drivers. Even SD content is unbelievable improved.

The aliasing noticeable on true interlaced 576i from my video camera are almost completely absent on the 8800 and the colour resolution of the 8800 is also a big step forward.

It'll also be interesting to see if the low end 8xxx cards will give the same improvements in image quality that you have noted.

Adrian

[Ata]

If Nvidia benchmarks are to be believed pretty much any current CPU paired with a 8500 or 8600 should be able to decode AVC/h264/VC1 at less than 80% CPU utilization. They claim the acceleration is akin to the MPEG2 acceleration in their 6xxx/7xxx chips. The CPU is only used for stream processing (reading and demuxing) and audio decoding. I can watch 15MBit MPEG2 HD material on my Pentium3 1GHz system using DXVA any day.

[Ajax9000]

If Nvidia benchmarks are to be believed pretty much any current CPU paired with a 8500 or 8600 should be able to decode AVC/h264/VC1 at less than 80% CPU utilization.

I certainly hope so. But as the limited data so far shows just feeding the GPU takes 10-15% of the capacity of a high-end quad-core CPU, I'd like to see some independant results looking at:

1- how the numbers scale therough the CPU families

2- how the numbers scale across the GPUs

3- what variation there is across a broader range of BD & HD-DVD titles.

Adrian

[Ajax9000]

Well, Anandtech has done their first look at these (8600GTS and 8600gt; 8500GT will be reviewed at a later date).

They used nice testbed in that they avoided a bleeding-edge setup (a E6320 + 4GB was used).

The basic results are that compared with an 8800, CPU utilisation dropped from ~60-90% to about 20-40% depending on the movie and the software player.

VC-1 doesn't get any significant boost as the VP2 was only designed for H.264.

Looks promising. We are getting reasonably priced HD HTPC GPUs, now lets hope the HD drives get reasonably priced soon too-- $899 is still way to much for a BD drive, at least the Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive can be got for $225.

Adrian

[helms]

I don't see why there is any reason to get the 8600gt or gts if the 8500gt allows the same cpu offload and does the same thing as the 8600gt or gts with watching video. Considering the game performance of the 8600gt and gts are not that good compared to other cards in same price range.

[drsmith]

According to the avsforum.com thread, the new full avc/h264/vc1 hardware decoding functionality is currently only available with Vista drivers. Windows XP/MCE will get this support by June/July timeframe. This is good to know as I (and no doubt many others) am using MCE with no intention to upgrade.

Could you please provide a link to the above thread.

I am also curious as to whether these cards offer 50hz support.

[sold]

Could you please provide a link to the above thread.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=835630

[IanD1503559705]

I can't play the Hong Kong movie though, but this is because PowerDVD 7.3 baulks at the ATI X800 graphics card drivers. This is both from the drive itself and from a copy of the King Kong disc on a hard drive, so it's not a HD-DVD drive issue. Playback of SD-DVD's from the drive has been fine.

I couldn't get PDVD 7.x to work with an ATI X300: either it doesn't work at all due to "wrong drivers" (PDVD 7.3) or I got a venetian blind screen (PDVD 7.2).

PDVD 6.5 however does work, but many titles won't play including King Kong. Harry Potter GOF works perfectly with menus, so if all titles were authored in the same way, PDVD 6.5 would be the solution.

However, if a title is decrypted to HDD and the .XPL file modified to remove any menuing commands and anything extraneous to the main feature, then it will play perfectly well with PDVD 6.5.

I think this demonstrates that playback issues are not due to technical constraints in the hardware, however modest, but Cyberlink's software decisions.

Nevertheless, I'm looking at testing a Gigabyte 8500GT to see if it unlocks the capabilities of PDVD 7.3 better as I doubt Cyberlink is going to support anything less than their recommended graphics cards anytime soon and it's just too time consuming working around the title issues with PDVD 6.5.

For those not wanting to follow the heirarchy of thread links, here is Anandtech's review of the 8600/8500 H.264 decoding capability: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2977&p=1

[drsmith]

I have tried the KK movie with PowerDVD 6.5 and note the following;

Like PowerDVD 7.3, PowerDVD6.5 plays the VC1 video files.

PowerDVD6.5 crashes when playback of the EVO files is attempted, both from the hard drive and the KK disc itself.

With PowerDVD in disc mode, playback of the scene on the menu screen commences with sound and I am able to navigate through the menu.

With playback of the movie however, I am getting some sort of picture in picture mode (with sound) which causes the CPU to max out or I get no picture (or sound) at all with the CPU running around 80%. When I do get a picture on the screen I also get english subtitles which, so far I have no control over (EDIT: I have since been able to de-activate the subtitles).

With PowerDVD 6.5, I in essence have the same issues that have been noted here.

[drsmith]

PDVD 6.5 however does work, but many titles won't play including King Kong. Harry Potter GOF works perfectly with menus, so if all titles were authored in the same way, PDVD 6.5 would be the solution.

I have been able to remove PinP on the KK main title by using the method outlined in a post on Doom9 here.

Interestingly though, the PinP window initially changes from the top left hand corner to the a position near the bottom right hand corner before dissapearing. After it dissapears, processor usage remains at 100% and playback of the main title remains stuttery.

Even though the PinP window is gone, I suspect that that the process that generates information for it is still running in the background.

The saga continues.

[digitaladvisor]

Well the hacking continues with this xbox 360 drive. Many claims in getting HD proper working.

Like these claims:

"Dave December 21st, 2006 - 4:44 am

Well, After many hours of screwing with this idea I have finally done it! I’m here to tell you all it is possible with the JP version of WinDVD8. I’m watching Dune in HD on my “super computer” without anything special except the X-Box HD DVD player! My next move is to get a video card with component outputs so I can jack this into my Epsom 10+ projector! $499 for a home player? @#$% that man! I hear ATI who just got bought by AMD has such a video card. I guess its time to put a PC under my coffee table for video. BTW my cpu is cruising comfortably at around %50 to do this.

The Specs.......................???

Nick February 8th, 2007 - 4:18 pm

Want to share my experience - the drive works beautifully on my XP box and plays HD DVDs.

What I did was:

1) Purchased PowerDVD 7.2 deluxe

2) Purchased Xbox 360 HD DVD drive

3) Downloaded drivers for XP (the device is recognized as Toshiba DVD drive)

5) Put King Kong HD DVD in the drive (come with the drive)

That’s it. It started to play. the picture quality is outstanding even compared to HD cable.

It plays through my Sharp Z2000 and My CRT monitor without any problems. Need to have a fairly fast PC - mine is AMD 64 X2 3800+, 1 GB, 7600 GT video. It used about 80% of the CPU while playing, so any slower PC would produce a jerky picture.

Best of luck to you all. HD DVD rules!

PS. Step 6. Switched my Netflix to HD DVDs!!!"

http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/11/8303/

Personnaly I stay clear of hacking like this. I give this sort of thing plenty of space like a year to 18 months.

DA