[lucky]

Ok ive read heaps of posts searched the forum for similar posts and I believe the only answer is to create a new post - so if youre going to flame me know that i have tried... and if i got it wrong i accept its my fail.

Ive been using xbmc on an xbox for many years hooked up to a server, its reached retirement for the usual list of reasons. Im speccing out a htpc box and i need to make fundamental choices and im confused.
REQUIREMENTS

1/ it must run xbmc
2/ reasonably future proof, headroom for graphics, cpu, sound etc
3/ it must play HD content
4/ i would like at some point to use it for gaming.
5/ i would prefer to run win7. (im not adverse to xbmc live via usb)

and here is the $5million question, which platform:

AMD/ati
Motherboard - DFI LANParty JR-790GX-M3H5
CPU - AMD PhenomII X3 720 BE (2.8Ghz AM3)

Intel/Nvidia
motherboard - DFI LANParty JR-GF9400-T2RS
CPU - Intel Core2Duo E7500 (2.93Ghz lga775)

from the forums i understand that vdpau is only supported under linux nvidia but surely the amd solution is more than fast enough? basically of the above 2 the e7500 is slower but the 790gx/sb750 chipset lacks 8.1 support.
to start out i will be using the IGP but later ill add some sort of sli/crossfire setup.

so opinions suggestions etc.

[jmarshall]

The latter for sure. ATI graphics == suck.

[lucky]

awesome i got a dev reply... now that i have an audience... can you elaborate on why ati sux, anandtech has the ati setup outperforming the nvidia on almost every bench (similar conclusion at toms), and the amd chip is a much better performer than the e7500. the price is way cheaper too.

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3432&p=4
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-...81-16.html

does it suck for xbmc ? for some particular reason youve experienced

Thanks!

[adamvh]

Well if your planning to run xbmc under linux which most people desire to.
ATI linux support is somewhat of a mess atm with several different x server drivers.

I recently turned my Asus Laptop W2W with ATI HD2600 Mobility into a media ceter running xbmc. And getting ATI running was a nightmare and in the end I found out the radeon driver didn't support audio over hdmi and radeonhd had bad colour tearing for me.

The ATI propitary driver didn't work.

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeon
http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd
http://www.radeonhd.org/

So yer basically to sum it up ati driver support under linux depending on the card isn't worth the effort.

I Recently purchased an Asrock ION 330 and litteraly was a sinch compared to the 50 odd hours I had to put into getting the W2W running properly which ended up compiling latest drivers from git and to get something functional :/

ohh yer and VDPAU ftw!

[adamvh]

Worth reading is..
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ar...aapi&num=1

Published on November 03, 2009
Written by Michael Larabel
Page 1 of 1
Discuss This ArticleFor a year now we have been talking about XvBA, which stands for X-Video Bitstream Acceleration and is designed to implement AMD's Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD2) engine on Linux systems for improving the video decoding and playback process on desktop systems. AMD has been shipping an XvBA library with their ATI Catalyst Linux driver since last year, but they have yet to release any documentation on the XvBA API or any patches to implement the support within any Linux media players. Heck, AMD has not even officially confirmed XvBA with Phoronix being the lone source of information for the past year. Today though, XvBA has finally become useful under Linux. But it is not what you may be thinking...

Finally, ATI Radeon customers under Linux can use XvBA, but it is not through using XvBA directly. AMD and Splitted Desktop Systems have been collaborating to develop xvba-video, which is an XvBA back-end for VA-API. Splitted Desktop Systems is the company that brought H.264 VA-API GPU video acceleration for Gnash, VA-API support in MPlayer and FFmpeg, and a NVIDIA VDPAU back-end for VA-API. This xvba-video library is like their NVIDIA VDPAU back-end, but it is for X-Video Bitstream Acceleration instead. Effectively this makes it possible for ATI customers to use VA-API, which in turn uses XvBA atop hardware with UVD2 support. This current implementation can accelerate only MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) and WMV9 (VC-1) formats at this time, which is more limited than NVIDIA's VDPAU implementation in their proprietary driver.

While the XvBA library has been with the driver for over twelve releases now, to use xvba-video it needs the Catalyst 9.10 driver (fglrx 8.66 or newer). Radeon HD 4000 series hardware (R700) as well as the newer Radeon HD 5000 series (R800 series; Evergreen) is recommended for XvBA usage. Though be forewarned before upgrading to Catalyst 9.11 later this month as the support may be broken in that release. Software supporting VA-API currently included MPlayer, FFmpeg, and the Helix media player. Of course, there are Splitted Desktop Systems' Gnash patches too, but they have not been submitted for mainline inclusion. The adoption of VA-API currently is not nearly as great as that of VDPAU, which can be found in MPlayer and FFmpeg along with Xine, MythTV, VLC Media Player, XBMC, and many others.

At the end of the day it's nice that UVD2 is finally usable on Linux (assuming no driver bugs), considering that the original ATI Unified Video Decoder was never supported, but it's still not as nice of an implementation as NVIDIA's VDPAU that is well supported and can handle a variety of different formats and can be used in a variety of different multimedia programs. With xvba-video though, it is just leaving developers to target VA-API for video acceleration, and it reduces AMD's need to provide any public documentation concerning the XvBA interface. At least though XvBA is now usable to assist in the HD video decoding process for Linux desktop users. The xvba-video package was just unlocked this morning in this SDS web directory, while neither AMD or Splitted Desktop Systems have yet to make an official announcement.

[lucky]

ok so im completely well and truly clear that amd/ati under linux is close to impossible/futile.

but what about win7 ?

[jmarshall]

On win7 you *might* be OK. Note that hardware decoding isn't going to be happening in the short-term (3 months?) at least on windows anyway. Longer term, sure.

ATI drivers in my experience suck. Enable vsync on Win XP SP3 (seems to be irrelevant what driver you're using) and you have 100% CPU usage as it spins waiting for vsync.

I suspect it may not be as bad in Vista and Win7, purely because we don't have to use exclusive mode there, and windowed mode doesn't seem to suffer the same problem.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[darkscout]

Get a feature set C video card.

Nvidia GT210/GT220. Decodes more in hardware. I never broke 10% CPU.

[Geeba]

Ahhhh now I'm in the market for a GFX card for my Live setup.... GT210/GT220 is theway to go then?

[RKMFlorida]

Yes, absolutely, I cannot say enough about my 210 w/XBMC. In fact, I've just posted about it a few times on this forum, I'm so happy with it.