Dear All, I recently purchased a HIS Radeon HD 3870 card. Its great for gaming and has given me much better results at the 1080p (1920x1080) resolution I use for all my gaming (with a Samsung 46M87BD) then my older nVidia 7800GTX. As you can see that I have my PC attached to a large 1080p display, I also like to watch some 1080p video clips I have downloaded off the net (mostly TV shows and other HD demonstrations). They all play well in the Window Media Player 10 (using Combined Community Pack) as well as in VLC (most of the times, not always). WMP10 usually requires 80-90% CPU while playing a 1080p clip but plays it perfectly. It only seems to use 4-6% of GPU while playing. I wanted to know if there is a way to offload more on to the GPU while playing such HD clips. I believe there is UVD on the 3870 and it should be able to accelerate High Definition Video. I have Catalyst 8.1 installed with CCC. Regards and thanks.
It only supports certain formats though. I don't think MKV is one of the supported formats, and AVI could be anything. AVI is just a container, not a format. You could have any video codec combined with any audio codec in an AVI.
Thanks for the reply. I have read that it supports the codecs used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (H264, VC1, Mpeg2 I think). Some of the Mkv and AVI files I downloaded include the words h.264 in their title but I understand that it may just reflect the original source from where they have been ripped. Anyhow, so is there a way to accelerate the High Definition video clips through the 3870 Video Card.
I think it depend on the encoder used for the AVI and MKV files. AFAIK, there was a problem with the x264-encoder (fixed by now I think) which prevented GPU-acceleration to work. But apart from that, there should be no problem accelerating h264 in AVI or MKV. Whether or not software implements acceleration for said containers is something else.
I would upgrade the CPU ASAP though, it's really holding back that 3870. My 3500+@ 2.6 held back some games massively, especially CPU heavy games. Everything is so much smoother with this X2. I can play 1080p perfectly with my CPU @ stock, it was in mpeg2 though. I stand corrected about MKV also, I thought it was a video codec and container. You might need the right codec pack also. MKV acceleration never worked perfectly for me, although I get less than 40% CPU with 720p MPEG4 MKVs.
I would have liked to upgrade to a dual-core CPU, however, unfortunately my Mobo has the older 939 socket and there are no X2 CPUs available for 939 anymore, at least not in my country. I would have to build a whole new system, a new mobo, new memory, new CPU. If I decide to do that, I'd probably build a new system with Core2Duo E8000 series (45nm) and use this computer with my older 7800GTX card as my secondary rig.
