A perfect HD video experience is in sight, and it’s going to be free with that motherboard you want to buy for your HTPC
Chris Morley is the Director of Product Development for Velocity Micro.
I was reminiscing with a graphics partner last week about the history of 3D acceleration and how exciting it was when the Wild West of 3D was ruled by add-in accelerators, 20! FPS in Unreal, and a three way throw down between APIs.
Remember spending that extra $299 for a second Voodoo II to go from 800x600 to 1024x768 resolution in Half-Life? Those were the days when you could show your technically apathetic spouse the difference between Quake II software rendering and 3D acceleration and have them genuinely be impressed.
These days I’m surprised the art of Spousal Acceptance Factor hasn’t spawned how-to manuals. Try explaining anti-aliasing with gamma correction to someone who doesn’t know pixie dust from a pixel and you’ll just get blank stares. Today the graphics wars are an orgy of stream processors, technical jargon, and enough bandwidth to run internet backbones if only they could fit in their entirety on a GPU. And money seems to be no object, considering the upward trend of pricing. Despite a couple misfires from both camps, ATI and NVIDIA have 3D acceleration down to an art form.
But an underlying, perhaps unsexy to some, struggle is brewing at a level that reminds me of those late 90’s glory days, and unlike 3D graphics where photo-realism is the dangling carrot tied to your chariot, the finish line really is in sight. And it’s not moving.
GPU-accelerated HD video processing and decoding is just starting to come into its own, and all sides have their guns trained on each other. As we go forward into an era of 100% CPU offload of the entire video decode pipeline, it’s no longer an issue of dropped frames or not – it’s moving into a realm of who better handles noise reduction, per-pixel motion adaptive de-interlacing, multi-directional diagonal filtering, proper cadence, and other Spousal Acceptance Factor trivia.
To continue my parallel with 3D acceleration, let’s take a look at the two most popular benchmarks for both realms: 3D Mark 06 and HQV. Arguments about the usefulness of 3D Mark aside, there is no “perfect score” – faster graphics processors and CPUs will get you a continuously higher score and better frame rates. That theoretically translates in the real world to acheiving higher resolutions, more anti-aliasing, better lighting, etc. However, Hollywood Quality Video (HQV) by Silicon Optix, the de facto benchmarking software for video processing, does have a perfect score. You can’t get a higher score than perfect. There is no extra credit. Either you handle that obscure cadence from Japanese Anime flicks or you don’t. And until the Digital Cinema Initiative hits your living room (don’t worry, 2K and 4K are a ways off), 1080p is the only resolution we have to aim for.
The advances being made today in video processing on the PC are awesome. I recently took a look at a publicly available driver that improved a single HD HQV test component from FAIL to 25 (perfect). A perfect score in a demanding test in one single driver release. I can only compare that to going from 3000 in 3D Mark 06 to 20,000 with one driver release on the same hardware. It just doesn’t happen. There are still gains to be made in PC-side management of and compatibility with today's HDTVs, but that's also improving by leaps and bounds.
And the best part about this whole saga, and what I was referring to in the title, is that all of this technology is getting stuffed into mainstream video cards and is heading to motherboards. Without the need for power-hungry and ASIC-hogging 3D acceleration transistors, technology like PureVideo HD and AVIVO HD are bringing fantastic HD viewing experiences to the masses without the need for $1200 and 450 watts worth of graphics cards. Between the NVIDIA 8600-series and the ATI 2600-series, which are the pinnacles of consumer video processing on the PC today, our options are fantastic.
While the overall war isn’t over, a new battle is beginning to take place in the integrated realm. The white elephant in the room is Intel, which rules this roost in market share, and I believe the next 6-9 months are going to be awesome. Current integrated GPUs can’t even handle 100% DirectX Video Acceleration without CPU assist, much less 100% CPU offload of bit stream processing for H.264 or VC1, but you can bet money that it’s coming.
The best part is that it’s not going to cost you an arm and a leg, the finish line is in sight, and it’s an exciting time for GPUs again. (Yes, DX10 is very cool, too.)
Chris Morley
www.morleydigital.com
“So far we have not seen a single Android device that does not infringe on our patents." -- Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith
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