HD video (1080p) on an old, old PC

[Idontcare]

Welcome to the forums WinnieNicklaus :thumbsup:

 

[WinnieNicklaus]

Just a thought, but when my media PC was a P4 and I wanted to watch 1080p movies on my TV ... It was an 8800GT, CUDA, and COREAVC codec that came through for me.

Hi mtnd3vil, what is CUDA?

 

[fffblackmage]

what is CUDA?

wiki - Compute Unified Device Architecture
It's a "parallel computing architecture developed by nVidia." I'm not really sure how to explain it, since I don't know much about it myself, but the wikipedia article has a decent summary on it.

Are you familiar with DXVA? I mentioned it before, and it's specifically for allowing video playback to be hardware accelerated (h264 decoding done on GPU instead of CPU). CUDA can be used the same way, though it has many other uses.

 

[mtnd3vil]

In addition to above, its an nvidia technology starting with 8 series cards. It can be used to speed up all kind of applications. The use of the technology must be built into the software you're using. The site I linked hosts a list of all software that does offer cuda support (this is where I found coreavc)

coreavc codec supports cuda for playback. I did some testing and on a P4 630 3.0Ghz I played a 10GB 1080p BD-ROM rip and got unwatchable playback and 100% CPU load and 0% GPU load. After configuring KMplayer to use coreavc and configuring coreavc to use CUDA, playback was buttery smooth at 60% CPU and 20-30% GPU load.

I have a new media PC now with a C2D but I still use coreavc/cuda because it worked so well on my P4.