Nvidia has given lots of promises regarding improved
high definition playback on Nvidia Graphics cards ( 6600 , 7 series, 8 series ) using
Purevideo technology. Searching the forums will show otherwise. Most of the people say, there is hardly any difference with playback.
So, what is the reality?
Does Nvidia Purevideo technology accelerate WMV HD ( high definition ) movies as they claim?We'll find that out soon. :-)
I myself own an
XFX Nvidia GeForce 8600GT PCIe card.
I'll mention my hardware configuration for comparing cpu utilization on your PCs.
AMD Athlon XP 3200 plus 64bit
ASUS A8N-VM Mother Board
2GB DDR400 Memory ( 1GB + 512MB + 512MB )
160 GB 7200rpm SATA2 HDD
XFX GeForce 8600GT ( 256MB dedicated + 256MB Turbocache )
Os, I used for testing purposes is Windows XP. I was using Vista earlier, but switched to XP for the kind of bugs Vista offers!! I'll write another blog on why I hate Vista. :-D
Now, I'll mention the softwares, I installed for testing purposes. All the softwares may not be necessary. But, since I'm not sure which of them are not necessary, I'll mention all the software, I installed. I'll mention these softwares in the order in which I installed them
1) Nvidia Purevideo Decoder.
2) Microsoft Hotfix 89122 --> WindowsMedia-KB891122-x86-ENU.exe
3) Microsoft Hotfix 888656 --> windowsmedia10-kb888656-x86-global-enu.exe
4) Windows Media Player11
After I installed all these softwares, I restarted Windows.
Opened Windows media player.
Opened Tools --> Options inside WMP11
Selected the Performance Tab, clicked on "Advanced" button
Made sure that the option - "Turn on DirectX Video Acceleration" is enabled.
Tip: For info on DirectX Video Acceleration ( DXVA ), please refer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DXVANow, I downloaded the
PureVideo 2007 Demo Video ( wmv hd 1080p ) from
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_hdcontent_home.htmlPlayed the demo 1080p WMV HD file, I downloaded using Windows media player 11
Processor usage was around 40 - 75% with rare or occasional slutter.
CPU Usage with DXVA ( Purevideo ) enabled.From the processor graph above while playing 1080p content, you could see that cpu never maxed out. And frame rate was pretty good. :-)
Now, I disabled the DXVA option from windows media player performance tab, and performance went pretty bad. Processor usage was a constant 100%. And even with such high processor usage, I could hardly get any appreciable frame rate. Video was hanging like anything. So, indeed purevideo works. :-)
CPU Usage with DXVA ( Purevideo ) disabled.If anyone of you have any problem getting this to work, feel free to contact me at netizen.indian@gmail.com
Labels: xfx Nvidia geforce Purevideo wmv hd 1080p 8600gt performance cpu utilization gpu optimize