ATI cards and hardware acceleration

[Pob]

Hoping other ATI users can help...
I am using an ATI 3450 card with latest 8.9 drivers (having given up on my 780g IGP).
Hardware acceleration works with all H264 content.
But, with DXVA working, I get a strange effect in PVRX2. The video plays but there are constant 'flashes' of previous frames, which is very distracting! The repeated frame is from maybe 2 seconds before.
Happens with PowerDVD H264 decoder or MPC HC decoder, when watching live HD TV, or HD TV recordings.
If the same recording is viewed in Power DVD, it plays fine.
Have tried searching the web, but it's hard to know how to phrase the search...so far have not found a single person reporting a similar issue!
In the UK HD TV is 1080i, and this does seem harder for decoders to handle.
CoreAVC works fine using only software decoding, but it has problems seeking in 1080i recordings...

[Pob]

Just an update - I found that this problem with frames playing out of order using hardware acceleration does happen in other software like MPC HC - but only if VMR9 is used. If VMR7 is selected, problem goes away. So seems to be an issue with the VMR9 custom allocator or VMR9 FSE.
Shame VMR7 support went with PVRX2!

[gazoo]

Hate to tell you, but Vista and EVR solve a lot of these problems and make them go away, including using the 780G. I have both types of machines, and the Vista one works a lot smoother and actually does DXVA correctly (for H.264 only, mpeg2 wasn't working and I don't feel like updating the video drivers because it might break something)

[mikiem]

IF it helps, there's a fairly lengthy thread over at avs forums - "ATI Radeon HD 2X00 ... owners... - that deals a bit with hardware accell. It can be a mess - I manually edit the registry to enable Avivo controls in CCC every month after updating drivers - but it has a pretty big effect in getting things working. Results also appear to sometimes vary depending on the brand/model of card, display etc.

In my experience Power DVD codec files can also act flaky, depending on the version of ATI's drivers you use. I've got an odd case (I hope ) where my ATI graphics card & ATI 650 TV card have Avivo conflicts that can crash the system. Long story short, for me turning off Avivo features like Fleshtone helps - & turning Hardware Accel &/or hardware de-interlace in PwrDVD can help (it doesn't always turn off DXVA as shown by GPU_Z). Hopefully you might find a combo of settings that'll work for you.