2008-03-26, 01:31 PM
Again FWIW... There are more and more articles and reviews out on graphics cards that include hardware video decoding acceleration, so never hurts to research any potential buys. My understanding from what I've read recently is that the cheaper cards have added chips just for video decoding, while the higher end models use the GPU & rely on the CPU more. Allegedly at around the $100 mark, last year, ATI had slightly better HD decoding performance, & those cards are now well below the $100 price range. But ATI software is another story... often a sad one I'm afraid. According to the later posts the new 8.3 drivers need less if any reg editing to enable HD accel, but IMHO it would be worth it to look at related, recent threads to see how the different ATI cards behave with your favorite or most used apps & games. I think another advantage you'd see with the 2xxx ATI cards would be price -- as the 3xxx cards enter the market more of the older ones will appear on sale at hopefully some pretty good mark-downs. OTOH the 3xxx cards handle PCI-E 2.0 if that might be important to you.
re: Avivo, it may, may not be much help in a lot of the cards before the 2xxx series, but I don't think that's the same as the hardware HD accel in the 2xxx & 3xxx versions. TO my knowledge the earlier avivo stuff focussed more on fast transcoding, and it was often faster that other methods/tools, but it's also available in a hacked version for any video card out there -- to me that hints that any ATI hardware wasn't really a factor.
re: Avivo, it may, may not be much help in a lot of the cards before the 2xxx series, but I don't think that's the same as the hardware HD accel in the 2xxx & 3xxx versions. TO my knowledge the earlier avivo stuff focussed more on fast transcoding, and it was often faster that other methods/tools, but it's also available in a hacked version for any video card out there -- to me that hints that any ATI hardware wasn't really a factor.
