Re: new graphics processor from VIA S3 for HD video

"Theunis Potgieter" <theunis.potgieter@xxxxxxxxx> · Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:56:00 +0200

So in an ideal world, it would be great to have a pci add-on card, that does not only do assisting, but actually does all the features, so by sending the compressed stream directly to board, and it does all the un-compressing and uses its own internal memory (on board memory) to do movement of uncompressed streams and doing additional post processing on the picture. Similar to a FF-card but independent of DVB and can do High 10 Profile (Hi10P).

I know it is a pipe dream. So in a perfect world it would be nice to have something like the following: pci board with a sigma 8635 chip for decoding (o rsomething similar) and a S3 chip for post processing (or something similar) onto one board with a s-video out, HDMI out, spdif out/audio out. And can do 1920x1080 progressive scan PAL @ 25 or even 50 frames per second. So that we can be ready for when BluRay hits the market (affordable). the output can either be by using a X driver or frame buffer driver. Oh well the wish list goes on :)

So the end user can then upgrade the output device when he/she can afford an upgrade to a HD output device and of course don't forget all have Open Source drivers hehe. Tomorrow I will wake up and realise the truth of it all...

To the future of open source!

On 23/04/2008, Martin Emrich <emme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi!

 Theunis Potgieter schrieb:

 > So it appears there is no hope for my old machine with an AGP port, and
 > nvidia G-Force 4 MMX 440.

I sit in a similar board (GF3 / GF2MX).

 > Looks like I will have to upgrade, but the craze
 > will have to settle first before I buy anything. I wonder why they don't
 > create add-on cards in PCI format? so that it will work on older machines? I

 > guess they want you to upgrade to keep on making money...

I don't think a simple PCI card can handle the bandwidth. Think Full-HD
 PAL Video:

 1920*1080*3 Byte/Pixel (RGB) * 25 FPS = 148MiB/s uncompressed RGB Data

 (For performance reasons one probably would even use 32bit/Pixel). The
 "classic" PCI Bus only does 133MB/s.

 > Isn't there a method to use OpenGL to assist HD decoding?

AFAIK most of the current accelerators (AMD AVIVO, nVidia PureVideo,...)

 use the programmable shaders for decoding, scaling, colorspace
 translation, etc.
 Most of the newer AMD/ATI cards seem not to have a "traditional" backend
 scaler anymore (making it hard for opensource driver devs to implement

 XVideo as they now have to touch the 3D engine).

 Ciao

 Martin

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