[mythtv-users] ATI AVIVO
Mike Choy
mike at acaciaclose.co.uk
Sun Jul 2 15:38:45 UTC 2006
Michael T. Dean wrote:
> On 07/02/2006 02:21 AM, Mike Choy wrote:
>
>
>> Ivan Kowalenko wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Jun 30, 2006, at 18.23, Mike Choy wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>> Have enabled ATI AVIVO Support on my laptop , seems to work, has
>>>>> anyone
>>>>> else got any experience, say vs XvMC.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>> Uhh, I'm not totally sure it's going to work. AVIVO (http://
>>> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVIVO) seems to be purely software. Not sure
>>> there's any Linux support on that. Even if it is, I doubt you're
>>> going to see any improvement versus XvMC. The purpose of XvMC is to
>>> offload some of the MPEG-2 decoding to the GPU.
>>>
>>> AVIVO doesn't have a thing to do with the GPU, but relies entirely on
>>> the CPU for work. High-Def MPEG-2 is straining enough to the CPU, so
>>> I doubt you're going to see ANY improvement. Besides, AVIVO does
>>> ENcoding. XvMC does DEcoding.
>>>
>>>
>> Sadly Wiki pedia is out of date.
>> Avivo provides accelerated Video playback using the 3DGPU, for any
>> application that uses XV and xorg 6.9 and above (standard in SUSE 10.1),
>> which gives it huge compatability vs XvMC.
>>
>> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=442&num=12
>>
>>
>
> But also means--in that mode--it's only doing the same acceleration that
> Xv does, but doing it with 3D hardware instead of 2D hardware.
> Therefore, AVIVO does not decode the stream or any part of it--it simply
> accelerates moving the image to the display once the CPU decodes it.
> Basically, it's a marketing thing to say it's there.
>
> If Myth wanted to use AVIVO to decode the stream, Myth would have to
> send the undecoded stream to the card using ATI-proprietary API's
> (because AVIVO itself is ATI-proprietary). So, I don't think it will
> happen.
>
> Mike
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>
Granted, but some quick benchmarks of playing back Elephants Dream at
720P in mplayer show the following, using top
1. Standard ATI XV Overlay -average CPU utilization show 35%-40%
2. Using ATI AVIVO Overlay -average CPU utilization show 18-25%
I believe that the average gains using XvMC are about 20% ?
Of Course with an ATI card, there is no Option of XvMC.
If anyone knows of a better way to benchmark this please let me know.
Mike C
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