semi-green computing

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 06:08:42PM -0500, Colin McGregor wrote:
> A topic that has been drawing a LOT of attention on the MythTV-users
> mailing list is the topic of VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API
> for Unix) a feature found in some NVidia GeForce 8 series and later
> video cards. A VDPAU supporting card will let you off load a lot of
> the video decoding work normally done by the CPU to the video card.
> Cards that support this can be found for under $60 (Canadian). These
> cards will let you use a fairly modest (read low power consumption)
> CPU chip. How modest you could go is a subject of debate, but let's
> just say that you will not need the latest fire breathing AMD/Intel
> CPU to support video tasks.
> 
> The gotchas include, only the testing version 0.22 of MythTV supports
> VDPAU (the current stable version of MythTV 0.21 doesn't support
> VDPAU). You have to tread cafefully regarding VDPAU support, there
> seems to be no rhyme or reason as to what cards in the GeForce 8
> series support what...

There is very obvious reason for which geforce 8 series have it.  If the
card uses a G80 GPU, it does not have it.  If it uses a newer one (G84,
G86 or G92) then it has it.

The G80 is used in the 8800GTX, 8800 Ultra, and the 8800 GTS 320 and
640MB versions.  The 8800GS, GT and GTS512MB are all G92, and all other
8xxx cards are G84 or G86 and hence all have the required PureVideo2 HD.

I will have to try this out on my 8600GT with mythtv.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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