[stefan_o]

Hello,
after having a spare Nvidia GT1030 from an old PC I upgraded my HTPC with it. As this card supports HEVC decoding I thought I could watch UHD with it. I know this card plays HEVC 4k / 50fps (UHD TV) fine with VLC on a Core i7 Haswell quad-core system. In my HTPC (Core i5 Ivy Bridge dual-core) using Kodi I get a lot of stuttering and CPU load of Kodi is between 300% and 400% (with hyper-threading 4 virtual cores).
I noticed that disabling VDPAU in the Kodi settings makes no difference, 1080p H.264 is still fine, HEVC is stuttering just like before.
Kodi allows me to enable/disable VDPAU for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (I assume that means SP/ASP, aka DivX 4/5 and Xvid, not AVC/HEVC) and VC-1, but AVC/HEVC is not mentioned, but from what I read in announcements of new versions it is supported. Vdpauinfo shows that VDPAU is supported.
I do not have any desktop installed, so I cannot test any other video player.

My system:
Core i5 Dual-Core Ivy-Bridge
16 GB RAM
Nvidia GT1030
Ubuntu 22.04.1
Nvidia driver 515.76
Kodi 20 (from PPA)

Best regards
Stefan

[stefan_o]

Ok, I think I found the problem: HEVC with 10 Bit (as it's commonly used) is unfortunately not supported by Kodi with VDPAU. From what I read it seems that it will never be supported, as VDPAU doesn't support 10 Bit and the new API (nvdec) is to complicated to implement.

What about nvidia-vaapi-driver? It implements VAAPI for Nvidia on top of NVDEC. In it's bug reports people requested Kodi support, another stated it was working with Kodi. I couldn't get it working (just a black screen). In this forum this is mentioned at all (if the search works)

[graysky]

I cannot comment on nvidia drivers.  If you're willing to buy a used Radeon on ebay, it should work for your use case.  I have the following setup and 10bit HEVC gets decoded on HW.

Arch Linux
Old Radeon RX550
Opensource drivers (these are Arch Linux package names, not sure what the Ubuntu equivalents are, xf86-video-amdgpu, libva, libva-mesa-driver, and mesa-vdpau)

[stefan_o]

I could not find any low-profile passive cooled Radeon card that has at least UVD 6.3. As even all new AMD processors now have internal graphics I don't think there will ever be a card in that niche, the Nvidia GT1030 was probably the last.