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H.264 nVidia driver acceleration
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Originally Posted by doublep
Does anyone know the status with ATI drivers? Are they accelerating H.264 for PC or mac? I would love to be able to play P720 on my 1.5 15" PB. At present it usually loses a couple of frames each second...
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For some strange reason, Apple seems to hate hardware acceleration of video playback. Given the history, It's unlikely that we'll ever see any progress on that front.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Originally Posted by Sophus
Does anyone know the status with ATI drivers? Are they accelerating H.264 for PC or mac? I would love to be able to play P720 on my 1.5 15" PB. At present it usually loses a couple of frames each second...
I don't think the Mobility Radeon 9700 features hardware H.264 decoding. Apple can't write a driver for a feature that doesn't exist.
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Originally Posted by f1000
I don't think the Mobility Radeon 9700 features hardware H.264 decoding. Apple can't write a driver for a feature that doesn't exist.
I know that the older chipsets are uncapable of doing complete hardware decoding of the newer codec H.264, so I see your point.
But, isn't that kind of what they did with quartz extreme anyway - it is a feature of the driver offloading compositing and a lot more calculations to the GPU? The modern GPU has immense powers albeit highly specialized. A driver or translation layer could possibly use the GPU for more tasks in decoding H.264 that Apple is pushing so hard, and by that offload the cpu more than what is done at the present situation?
BTW, the article the threadstarter links to states that ATI has a H.264 accelerating driver for PC, so that answered part of my question.
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Last edited by Sophus; Mar 3, 2006 at 01:05 PM.
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Quartz Extreme is a feature of the driver?
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Chuck
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"Instead of either 'multi-talented' or 'multitalented' use 'bisexual'."
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ATi has drivers out on the PC side for hardware H.264 acceleration on the x1k cards.
cheers
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Originally Posted by Chuckit
Quartz Extreme is a feature of the driver?
As I understand it, it is rather a glue or translation layer, preparing the data for processing by GPU. It is software made to take advantage of the GPU for work previously done by the CPU. A driver is probably not the correct label, but not that wrong either.
Anyone with more knowledge on the subject? Could something similar be done to accelare H.264 decoding?
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Moderator  Join Date: Apr 2000
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Originally Posted by Sophus
As I understand it, it is rather a glue or translation layer, preparing the data for processing by GPU. It is software made to take advantage of the GPU for work previously done by the CPU. A driver is probably not the correct label, but not that wrong either.
Anyone with more knowledge on the subject? Could something similar be done to accelare H.264 decoding?
Of course. It's called CoreVideo and is a feature of 10.4.
To sort out the terminology a bit here, Quartz Extreme is just a feature of the windowserver application. It makes calls to OpenGL for some of its operations - just like any 3D game does. OpenGL is an API that makes sure that the 3D-graphics are displayed, using the GPU if possible. For OpenGL to be able to use the GPU, there needs to be a driver. OpenGL-support is a feature of the driver - Quartz Extreme is something you get for free once you have that.
Strictly speaking are there levels to OpenGL-support - first of all there are versions to OpenGL, and secondly not all functions are accelerated by all cards. A card that "supports Quartz Exreme" is likely a card that supports all functions used by the Quartz Extreme-feature in the windowserver.
CoreVideo, like CoreImage, is another API that needs driver support to function. The driver support is currently missing for some of the more advanced features like H.264-support.
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Do you think that's coming, P?
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Moderator Join Date: Apr 2000
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In this case, you get what you pay for. nVidia delivers a package - driver and chips - to Apple. If Apple wants the driver to have H.264 support, they will pay nVidia enough to make that happen. I think that all future nVidia chips used in Macs will have that feature in the driver, but I can't say about legacy chips. Considerng how Jobs wants everyone to replace their machines rather than upgrade them, it's possible that they won't have a very high priority. My best guess is that legacy chips will get if you have the driver mostly for free once you've done it for newer chips, but not otherwise.
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