ATI's Avivo Platform - H.264 Decode and Transcode Acceleration on R5xx
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 20, 2005 10:44 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
GPU Accelerated H.264 Transcode
The two stages of the video pipeline to which Avivo pays particular attention are the encode and decode stages. Of course, with the Theater 550, ATI already offers hardware MPEG-2 based encoding, so that is not really a new feature of the Avivo platform. The more interesting feature is the "VPU assisted transcode" that is now a part of Avivo.
All Avivo enabled graphics cards will support this GPU assisted transcode; the only requirement will be that the appropriate Catalyst driver is installed. While ATI is currently planning to release the first of their R5xx GPUs by the end of this month, the transcode acceleration will not be ready by that time. ATI has committed to delivering the transcode acceleration by the end of this year, and more specifically, about a month after the release of the R5xx GPUs. We have no word as to how much of a performance boost you'll see with the GPU assisted transcode, although the largest gains will be going from formats like MPEG-2 to something like H.264. (The reason being that H.264 encoding is incredibly slow using CPU-only encoding right now.)
The two stages of the video pipeline to which Avivo pays particular attention are the encode and decode stages. Of course, with the Theater 550, ATI already offers hardware MPEG-2 based encoding, so that is not really a new feature of the Avivo platform. The more interesting feature is the "VPU assisted transcode" that is now a part of Avivo.
All Avivo enabled graphics cards will support this GPU assisted transcode; the only requirement will be that the appropriate Catalyst driver is installed. While ATI is currently planning to release the first of their R5xx GPUs by the end of this month, the transcode acceleration will not be ready by that time. ATI has committed to delivering the transcode acceleration by the end of this year, and more specifically, about a month after the release of the R5xx GPUs. We have no word as to how much of a performance boost you'll see with the GPU assisted transcode, although the largest gains will be going from formats like MPEG-2 to something like H.264. (The reason being that H.264 encoding is incredibly slow using CPU-only encoding right now.)
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ViRGE - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
Hexus has confirmed Avivo platforms will be HDCP/HDMI compliant.ViRGE - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
Didn't ATI already promiss this feature last time? When they launched the X800, they advertised accelerated encoding/decoding of MPEG1, 2, and 4; and right now all they've actually done is decode acceleration of 1 and 2, with no sort of encode acceleration to be seen. I'm really getting leery of all these video features that fail to materialize.MrJim - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
With my Radeon 9800 i can accelerate divx when i use the divx player, thats mpeg4 for me. But im looking forward to better support in the hardware.ViRGE - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
That's not decode acceleration, that's simply a form of deblocking where the Divx codec doesn't deblock the video then passes it to the 9800 to deblock(and I use the term loosely because the Divx codec itself does a better job, IMHO).mongoosesRawesome - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
nvidia has really aggrivated me with their purevideo. they tout purevideo as a feature of their graphics cards, but in order to enable it, you have to pay them 20 dollars for their purevideo software. after paying 400 dollars for a graphics card, i expect the features listed for the graphics card to be included in drivers. i think anandtech and other hardware review sites need to be more explicit about how purevideo is only enabled after purchasing extra software from NVIDIA.while I haven't been as impressed with ATI's video game performance as of late, WMV9 acceleration is included in their drivers all the way back to my 9800 Pro, a feature NVIDIA wasn't able to deliver with their AGP 6800 series cards, and only available after paying them for extra software on newer cards.
Rock Hydra - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
I agree. That pissed me off when I found out about having to buy additional software. Maybe a 3rd party has come up with a way to enable the abilities of purevideo. Even better, for free. /crosses fingersJep4444 - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
ATI drivers work fine for games, ive never had one game fail to run on me through two Radeon cards(ill admit the drives for the Rage sucked as i couldnt get quite a few games to run on that thing)I'm curious what Intels reaction to this since it treads into the same territory as Viiv, i think ATI should try to strategically place themselves together if they want Avivo to suceed to its full potential
Myph - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
Only thing really holding me back from going ATI, I just can't trust that their drivers are going to work for ALL games, all the time.photai - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
maybe you should consider how it performs as well. I think it is important too.Griswold - Tuesday, September 20, 2005 - link
Humbug. Their drives have no more problems with brand new games than nvidias.