Nice work. That must have taken some time. The PIII-S continues to impress.

What version of driver you use with your Radeon 9800 Pro ?

I got some questions:
What features are exactly accelerated by the Radeons in combination with powerdvd 4 ?

How do you measure the CPU usage?
How do you measure the fps?
Are the videos played from HDD? (ATA or SCSI? DMA?)
Does the graphics mode you use has full overlay+scaling support? And is the same renderer output used in Win2K/XP/7 ?
Why no direct comparison PDVD4 to MPC-HC in XP to get an overlapping data point?
Which decoding filters (name+version) are used?
Is sound output format set to stereo (2.0)?

Why are you using PowerDVD for the older ones?

Interesting thread, I did try a few software DVD players on a Cyrix MII 333, ALi alladin V and RAGE PRO Turbo 8mb(on board), 512Mb SDRAM & Windows ME, was mostly a failure, the Cyrix is not a good choice for video playback.

On my Sony Vaio PCG-F707 Laptop with Pentium III 600 and NeoMagic 256AV+ with 3 MB Vram and AGP bus I play videos on Win98SE on VLC 0.8.6, first I installed ffdshow rev 1936, next i unpacked VLC from zip and I can play videos even with subtitles fully smooth, also with movies from DVD I don`t have any problems there. But I must for that change desktop to 16bit color, in 24 bit I can`t play anything smooth, but even with that 16bit color movies look good for me.

With the K6 you should look into being sure write allocation is enabled for the video card. I saw a big improvement on a Voodoo3 + Aladdin V + K6-3 setup by enabling it in the AGP GART with ALI's utility. Software playback became smooth.

I'm pretty sure on Intel this is handled automatically by some driver or the BIOS. I had a 300 MHz Katmai playing DVDs in software.

SSE is useful for MPEG2 iDCT and I think that's why it is so helpful.

Tiger433 wrote:

What version of driver you use with your Radeon 9800 Pro ?

To keep things as lean as possible I used an older driver, Catalyst 4.12

elianda wrote:

I got some questions: What features are exactly accelerated by the Radeons in combination with powerdvd 4 ? Motion compensation […]
Show full quote

I got some questions:
What features are exactly accelerated by the Radeons in combination with powerdvd 4 ?
Motion compensation and IDCT is handled by the Radeons in PowerDVD. The processor still performs bitstream decoding, even in HW accelerated mode.

How do you measure the CPU usage?
Not in the most scientific way. 😊 But I believe the following method is Good Enough(tm).
-First, I wait a few minutes for Windows to settle down after booting.
-I then pick a scene with plenty of action and/or fine detail and play 2 minutes of that clip on each setup.
-As the clip plays, I keep track of minimum and maximum CPU usage numbers as displayed by Windows Task manager. I monitor total CPU usage, not dvdplayer.exe.
-I discard any extreme highs and lows. For example, the A64 3700+ entry in the chart had an actual CPU usage range of 0-21%. However, the system very rarely went below 7% or above 16%.

How do you measure the fps?
Those were really just rough estimates. I've played around with enough benchmarks that I know what 15fps looks like. But the main point of those notes was that the system was too slow to decode the video stream at its full frame rate.

Are the videos played from HDD? (ATA or SCSI? DMA?)
Movies were played from the DVD drive. All of the Win2K and XP systems had PATA drives with DMA enabled. The Win7 systems had SATA DVD drives.

Does the graphics mode you use has full overlay+scaling support? And is the same renderer output used in Win2K/XP/7 ?
Yes.
Win2K and XP were using the same renderer--PowerDVD doesn't let me choose. MPC-HC in Win7 used EVR CP. Also, DWM and transparent glass effects were enabled on all Win7 machines.

Why no direct comparison PDVD4 to MPC-HC in XP to get an overlapping data point?
Yeah, I should've done that. I probably will retest the faster XP machines with MPC-HC and add results to the chart later on. I originally picked PowerDVD for the 2K/XP machines to give the K6 and PII machines a bit of a boost. The LAV software decoder in MPC-HC outputs sharper looking video than the ancient version of PowerDVD, but it does burn more CPU cycles in the process. I believe it also requires SSE. So, to keep things consistent in NT5 land, I just used PowerDVD on all of them.

Which decoding filters (name+version) are used?
The XP/PowerDVD machines just used the standard Cyberlink MPEG2 decoder built into that version of PowerDVD.
Win7/MPC-HC used LAV video decoder 0.58.2, which is a slightly modified ffmpeg.

Is sound output format set to stereo (2.0)?
Yes

GL1zdA wrote:

Why are you using PowerDVD for the older ones?

PowerDVD 4 is very lean and works well with older hardware. Cyberlink's old MPEG2 decoder doesn't require SSE and is much faster than the relatively recent version of LAV/ffmpeg I used on the newer machines. Also, modern decoders don't appear to support older hardware acceleration methods used by cards like the Radeon VE and 9800 Pro; they just drop back to software mode.
While I could've used MPC-HC on the PIII and newer machines, I decided to keep using PowerDVD so that the newer CPUs could be directly compared to the older ones.

BSA Starfire wrote:

Interesting thread, I did try a few software DVD players on a Cyrix MII 333, ALi alladin V and RAGE PRO Turbo 8mb(on board), 512Mb SDRAM & Windows ME, was mostly a failure, the Cyrix is not a good choice for video playback.

I'd love to get my hands on some of the less common S7 chips as well as the 100+MHz 486 processors and do an MPEG-1/VCD comparison.

swaaye wrote:

With the K6 you should look into being sure write allocation is enabled for the video card. I saw a big improvement on a Voodoo3 + Aladdin V + K6-3 setup by enabling it in the AGP GART with ALI's utility. Software playback became smooth.

Hmm, I might have to look into that. None of the K6 machines are assembled at the moment, but if either of the S7 boards had that setting in the BIOS, it's definitely something I would've enabled.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Hmm, I might have to look into that. None of the K6 machines are assembled at the moment, but if either of the S7 boards had that setting in the BIOS, it's definitely something I would've enabled.

Yeah on my ASUS P5A, it had to be enabled with either registry tweaks or the ALI AGP utility (basically a GUI for registry tweaks to their driver).

I believe you can use a utility like Central Tweaking Unit to enable write combining / write allocation with any video card.

It's a lot of effort for something that they should've gotten working automatically like Intel did.

ctcm allows you to check if write allocation, write combining and cacheable area are set correclty.

Video encoding and decoding is an interesting problem.
There are many variables to play with. For example, the MPEG format can be seen as a stream of a 'JPG image' (I-frame) followed by some delta-encoded information (motion blocks/vectors, mostly P-frame).
Now, different CPUs have different strengths and weaknesses.
So, one CPU may be faster if you encode the video with relatively many I-frames, while another CPU may be faster with more P-frames.
And then there is the issue that using more I-frames will result in lower compression, so you will require more bandwidth to read the video data.
Of course you could reduce the quality settings so the I-frames will become smaller again, reducing bandwidth... etc.

So what I'm saying is: it would be interesting to encode the same video with various different settings, to see how the different versions of the video perform on the same CPU.
Of course the encoder and decoder used can also affect things. Not all codecs perform the same, both in terms of speed and in terms of quality.

Added a few more charts!

-WMV at 480p
-xvid at 480p
-xvid at 720p

Loving this thread! It'd be neat if you had some K6-2+/K6-III+ CPUs for comparison, I wonder if on-die L2 cache helps in any meaningful way.

I wonder how a dual PIII-S system would fare. Those CPUs are beastly when you remember how old they are. One would not think they are capable of HD video playback.

F2bnp wrote:

Loving this thread! It'd be neat if you had some K6-2+/K6-III+ CPUs for comparison, I wonder if on-die L2 cache helps in any meaningful way.

I've been toying with the idea of setting up a K6 Super System. Something like a K6-3+ overclocked to around 600MHz. I wonder if it would catch up to the 300A @ 450 in video decoding.

alexanrs wrote:

I wonder how a dual PIII-S system would fare. Those CPUs are beastly when you remember how old they are. One would not think they are capable of HD video playback.

Dual PIII-S on an overclockable DDR board is something I want in a bad, bad way. Prices for such boards are insane here in Canada, so I'll probably never own one.

Added new charts!
-H.264 at 852x480
-H.264 at 1280x720

Added high bit rate H.264 at 1080p.

Added 1080p VC-1. Software decoders for this format don't seem to be as efficient as software AVC decoders.

You could also add 640x360, as this was a typical resolution in PIII/P4 heyday. (480p was considered high quality back then)