[mythtv-users] GeForce 8400 still recommended for VDPAU?

[Johnny]

>> Do you really gain anything getting a high power usage and expensive video
>> card over just getting a powerful CPU and letting the CPU do the decoding?
>>  This 9500GT seems to have coper heat pipe cooling so it must be a power
>> hog. Just asking...
>
> Good point. Merely moving the work from the CPU to the GPU may not actually
> help anything but nVidia's bottom line, but when most of the work a machine
> is doing is graphically related, it might be done more efficiently by
> dedicated hardware.
>
> Using dedicated hardware usually leads to increased efficiency, but reduced
> flexibility.
>
> You have to look at the whole picture.

I agree that the GPU is probably going to do the work more efficiently
because it has hardware specifically designed for these calculation
vs. the general purpose hardware on a CPU. Another consideration is
that you have to have a video card of some kind anyway. Also, the x400
and x500 series cards are on the lower end power wise. We are
primarily interested in and only utilize the 2D hardware, so we aren't
going to be drawing all the power that the 3D hardware would use
during gaming. It is important to note that by most accounts the image
quality of the VDPAU deinterlacers is superior to all of the software
deinterlacers currently available in mythtv, so it isn't just a matter
of shifting computation.