Hardware acceleration

[AmericanSlon]

Hi,

As you might have notice i am having a diarrhea of all the questions I have ever had about GBPVR
So here goes another one. How do I make sure I am taking advantage of hardware acceleration? I have ATI 3450 and I want to be sure I am getting the best picture I can get.
Thank you.

[jam_zhou]

I've got the same card and I've had some success but not 100%.

You can use either PowerDVD ultra 7 or the MPC video decoders from the media player classic home cinema edition sourceforge website.

With the ATI cards ensure that you've enabled hardware acceleration in your CCC settings - something to do with enable pull down or something like that.

I've been able to test on several MKV files and here are my results:
File 1 - 720p --> works perfectly with < 10% CPU usage (MPC works, cyberlink had weird fps issues)
File 2 - 1080p --> works perfectly with < 10 % cpu usage (both decoders work)
File 3 - 1080p --> no hardware acceleration >50% cpu usage with skipped frames (MPC worked with no HWA but cyberlink crashed and restarted the PC)

So, my conclusion is that though HW accelartion is good in theory, if the file is 1080p and not properly encoded HW acceleartion is useless - take that as you will. I've been trying use CoreAVC, but my merits are screwed up right now and my computer won't use CoreAVC.

There's a good thread on using the MPC decoder in the forums do a search on hardware acceleration.

Jam.z

[AmericanSlon]

So not every decoder is capable of HWA?

Also I try not to install anything on my tv machine unless I absolutely need it. Is there a way to turn on HWA without CCC?
Thanks

[jam_zhou]

For HWA you need three things:

1. HWA hardware
2. HWA compatible decoder
3. HWA compatible media file

I think CCC is required for that menu...you probably want to have it as you will want to control your colour and brightness settings of you TV-out.

As for the MPC decoders, they play nice as you register and unregister manually. Try these first as Power DVD installs a bunch of stuff.