BluRay on older system

[smirks]

Hi,

I have an older system based on an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and 2GB DDR
RAM, running Windows XP 32bit. Recently, however, I upgraded my video
card to a Geforce 8800GTS with 340Mb of onboard RAM.

As I do not really play so many games, I'm quite happy with my current
setup but would like to add a Bluray drive in order to be able to
watch HD movies. The bare minimum specs I've read on the Internet for
bluray playback (e.g. for WinDVD Plus) are AMD Athlon 3800+, and
recommended specs are much higher. However, since the video card
features Purevideo HD, which offloads at least some of the processing
required from the CPU, I was thinking that I should be fine as long as
I enabled hardware acceleration.

Is that correct? Do you think the above setup is enough for smooth blu
ray playback in full 1080p mode? Also, do you know of any test or demo
videos in H.264 as well as VC-1 formats, that I could use to test?
Ideally full disc images that are small enough to download and mount
on a hard drive...

Clyde

 

[Paul]

Hi,

I have an older system based on an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and 2GB DDR
RAM, running Windows XP 32bit. Recently, however, I upgraded my video
card to a Geforce 8800GTS with 340Mb of onboard RAM.

As I do not really play so many games, I'm quite happy with my current
setup but would like to add a Bluray drive in order to be able to
watch HD movies. The bare minimum specs I've read on the Internet for
bluray playback (e.g. for WinDVD Plus) are AMD Athlon 3800+, and
recommended specs are much higher. However, since the video card
features Purevideo HD, which offloads at least some of the processing
required from the CPU, I was thinking that I should be fine as long as
I enabled hardware acceleration.

Is that correct? Do you think the above setup is enough for smooth blu
ray playback in full 1080p mode? Also, do you know of any test or demo
videos in H.264 as well as VC-1 formats, that I could use to test?
Ideally full disc images that are small enough to download and mount
on a hard drive...

Clyde

The Corel web page offers to trial the software for some period
of time. You could fire up the trial and see how well it works.
Now, all you need, is some Bluray test clips for download from the
net. You only need a couple minutes worth, with lots of action,
to get some idea if it'll stutter or not.

Another option. CyberLink BD Advisor (Beta). Supposed to test
your hardware.

http://www.cyberlink.com/english/support/blu-ray_support/diagnosis.jsp

Corel has one too. WinDVD HD/BD advisor tool.

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Content/1193332030582

My guess would be they won't use real content, because that
would make the downloads too big. Maybe you can post back
what your results were like.

Have fun,
Paul

 

[jaster]

Hi,

I have an older system based on an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and 2GB DDR RAM,
running Windows XP 32bit. Recently, however, I upgraded my video card to
a Geforce 8800GTS with 340Mb of onboard RAM.

As I do not really play so many games, I'm quite happy with my current
setup but would like to add a Bluray drive in order to be able to watch
HD movies. The bare minimum specs I've read on the Internet for bluray
playback (e.g. for WinDVD Plus) are AMD Athlon 3800+, and recommended
specs are much higher. However, since the video card features Purevideo
HD, which offloads at least some of the processing required from the
CPU, I was thinking that I should be fine as long as I enabled hardware
acceleration.

Is that correct? Do you think the above setup is enough for smooth blu
ray playback in full 1080p mode? Also, do you know of any test or demo
videos in H.264 as well as VC-1 formats, that I could use to test?
Ideally full disc images that are small enough to download and mount on
a hard drive...

Clyde

Yeah, I don't think so. If the minimum is 3800+ then your cpu won't be
able to keep up. When HD videos first appeared I had a similar slower
cpu coupled with a higher performance video. Playback dropped frames
and complained about the cpu being too slow.

I don't know your system but why would you want to watch Blu-Ray on a
PC? Or if you have a PS/3?

I've watched 2 Blu-Ray movies on my PC already, but I'd really rather
watch them on a large screen HDTV connected to a 7.1 home theater.

 

[RobV]

Having just ran these two, it looks like they are only a
generic checklist type of app, they don't actually measure
any decoding performance.

A Google search should find H.264 and VC-1 1080p files that
could be used to gauge playback performance, it wouldn't
necessarily need to be a disc image that's mounted.

That is a great way to test the CPU's ability to decode HD content, but
if I understand the OP, he has a nVidea video card with a GPU that will
decode HD in hardware, thus off-loading the CPU.

However, you have to have software that is aware of the GPU hardware and
that will utilize it when playing a Blue-Ray DVD, or HD files.

I don't know if the CPU plus the video card the OP has will decode
Blue-Ray without difficulty, as I'm not familiar with the hardware (I'm
using Intel Core2 Duo CPU/ATI video card, with a Blue-Ray HD accelerated
GPU as well).

There is a x264 benchmark available for Intel CPU's, but I don't know if
it will work with AMD, or if there's an AMD counterpart. Perhaps
performance could be inferred by comparing similar CPUs.

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=499&pgno=5

 

[RobV]

RobV wrote:

[snip]

I don't know if the CPU plus the video card the OP has will decode
Blue-Ray without difficulty, as I'm not familiar with the hardware
(I'm using Intel Core2 Duo CPU/ATI video card, with a Blue-Ray HD
accelerated GPU as well).

There is a x264 benchmark available for Intel CPU's, but I don't know
if it will work with AMD, or if there's an AMD counterpart. Perhaps
performance could be inferred by comparing similar CPUs.

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=499&pgno=5

Well, it might help if I read a bit before posting. This page has both
AMD and Intel scores as well as the benchmark program you can run on
your own system with a better explanation of the benchmark:

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=442&pgno=0

 

[jaster]

You're trying to make a distinction that doesn't exist. If it'll decode
on the GPU with one it will with the other (video source), using the
same playback software he'd use for the blu-ray disc.





Yes, and a new enough driver for the video card. In the end it still
comes down to actually trying to play a HD file encoded with one of the
two more common codecs and we might as well skip MPEG-2 since it is the
least compute intensive of the three most common ones used.




That's measuring x264 encoding time, it wouldn't necessarily tell if the
system plus GPU is fast enough at decoding the two most common higher
compression Blu-ray codecs in a 1080p video.

Googling for a H.264 or VC-1 1080p (movie trailer for example) would be
a much better gauge of whether the system is up to the task.

I can guarantee his nVideo will decode Blu-Ray but his cpu won't be able
to keep up with video for smooth playback.

 

[jaster]

If the video card does the decoding the CPU won't be loaded all that
much, that's the point of the GPU decoding.

Check it out for yourself there's always post-decoding processes for the
cpu.

AMD HD2600Xt and 8600 GTS are less cpu intensive than a 8800 GTX or
HD2900XT and the slower the cpu the more cpu utilization.