Radeon HD2600 AGP and YouTube acceleration

[zelcs]

So I have this wonderful, yet very slightly dated computer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93gGHbie8XA.

Naturally, watching YouTube is like watching a gentle slieshow. HD mode - forget about it.

This system has a rather exotic and, as it turns out, absolutely pain-the-arse Asus ATi Radeon HD2600 Pro AGP, which ATi/AMD does not support, and, perhaps, never ever supported in first place (?).

What I want is to be able to accelerate YouTube (whether Flash or HTML5) playback with the GPU, which sits at 0% load while the CPU is maxed out running the slideshow.

HD2XXX and 2600 in particular are advertised to have some form of hardware H264 decoding, but I am pretty sure it is not compatible with Windows 7/Vista. I am using 7, btw. Also, there is much more to the Flash YouTube decoding than just plain H264 job.

The default driver which Windows 7 installs (and keeps on automatically installing, no matter what) runs the desktop sort-of alright. Even BF2 seemed to work.

But 3DMark 2006 score is very weak and Chrome scrolling is stuttery, not to mention things like terrible flash video performance.

I have spent a few days installing various kinds of drivers, but none have given any improvements, and installing them was always a pain, as the Catalyst installer for whatever reason will fail to install display driver and I have to do that manually.

Is there any hope of having this AGP card do YouTube acceleration in Windows 7, or should I forget about it.

It it such a waste, because I know that card has the potential (horsepower) to solve the problem, but it's held back by lacking drivers.

 

[mindbomb]

You can disable automatic driver installs in windows. You probably have to get the drivers from asus's website. From there, check what hardware acceleration is supported in chrome by looking in chrome://gpu . You might have to add --ppapi-flash-args=enable_hw_video_decode=1 to the chrome shortcut if it's still not on after it shows that it is supported.

Furthermore, what I do is use the tampermonkey addon with the youtube center script, which allow you to download the 720p videos off youtube and use your own player, like mpc hc.

 

[ViRGE]

The default driver which Windows 7 installs (and keeps on automatically installing, no matter what) runs the desktop sort-of alright. Even BF2 seemed to work.

I take it then you've already tried the latest Catalyst Legacy driver? 13.9 says it supports the old AGP cards, and that for better or worse is going to be your best bet.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/legacy?product=legacy2&os=Windows 7 - 32

 

[mindbomb]

It supports native agp cards, but my fear is that it doesn't support the cards that do pci-e to agp conversion on board.

 

[ViRGE]

It supports native agp cards, but my fear is that it doesn't support the cards that do pci-e to agp conversion on board.

There are no native HD series cards. All of them are PCIe native with AGP enabled via a bridge chip. AMD's X series were their last native AGP cards.