Video overlay - essential for fast video playback

[Karlos]

"Tseh Tseh, BVision, jump into that PCI/PCIe slot!"

These RadeonHD owners don't know they're born. In my day we had blinkenlights and we thought we were lucky...

Anyway, I heard you've been working on Radeon R100/R2x0 as well.

Yeah, but mostly 3D related for now. I narrowly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in a recent refactor of the R100 code, so right now I'm working through the changesets in my local repository to see what heinous crime I just committed.

I almost feel sorry for you, such a pain in the behind...

I've been called worse :lol:

[Akiko]

@Karlos

Tell it to my BVision :razz:

Silly hypothetical question, do you think this driver could be specially adapted without DMA for a mediator busboard running OS4.1 classic?

[Karlos]

@Karlos



Silly hypothetical question, do you think this driver could be specially adapted without DMA for a mediator busboard running OS4.1 classic?

Which driver?

[Akiko]

Sorry any of the currently worked on Radeon HD drivers, as I understand PCI Variants of these cards exist.

[Karlos]

Sorry any of the currently worked on Radeon HD drivers, as I understand PCI Variants of these cards exist.

It could get pretty messy, particularly with the Mediator1200. The thing is, by the time you get to the classics, the disparity between the processor and the graphics card becomes so great that you have to wonder what the point would be. Classics have a hard time keeping the old radeon cards busy as it is.

[magnetic]

karlos

I have to say you are giving a very nice technical argument for overlay not important going forward, however you are missing the main thrust of this whole argument is that CURRENT OS4 SAM users will NOT have proper video playback for a long time due to lack of overlay.

So, for Sam, A1, and Peg2 OS4 users Overlay is far from Obselete. Actually its Critical.

[Derfs]

karlos

I have to say you are giving a very nice technical argument for overlay not important going forward, however you are missing the main thrust of this whole argument is that CURRENT OS4 SAM users will NOT have proper video playback for a long time due to lack of overlay.

So, for Sam, A1, and Peg2 OS4 users Overlay is far from Obselete. Actually its Critical.

And they have it already with their radeon 9250s etc. this is about newer cards that the peg 2 and some amigaones won't be able to use.

[jj]

Hans is better placed to tell you than I am. The most advanced Radeon card I presently own is an R200 :lol:

But I expect it'll make a significant performance difference. What would be even better would be some support for programming the shader units directly. You could probably offload the entire decode video process then.

Of course, as a long time nVidia fanboi, I'm obliged to point out that all things Radeon suck.

However, that's not actually true at all (only their linux drivers suck in my experience) and I have to say, the 79xx series has certainly caught my attention. It's kicking some serious green corner ass at OpenCL centric tasks right now. It's almost an exact transposition of the G200 v HD47xx days when it was ATI being defensive over compute performance and pointing at gaming as the primary issue.



That's quite a step up.

Must say I am loving the 7970M in this laptop

[Karlos]

karlos

I have to say you are giving a very nice technical argument for overlay not important going forward,

Actually, I've not. I've simply made the case that what you all are calling "overlay" is not a single implementation. I chose the terms "hardware video surface" (the abstract concept), "video texturing" (an implementation) and "overlay" (another implementation) carefully and with good reason. To avoid the same arguing in circles that people seem to be insisting on doing.

however you are missing the main thrust of this whole argument is that CURRENT OS4 SAM users will NOT have proper video playback for a long time due to lack of overlay.

I'm not missing it, I'm confused as to which part of this argument is actually valid. If you own a Sam with a RadeonHD already and you absolutely can't wait for some form of video acceleration, you can opt for an R200 card and shelve your RadeonHD until the work has been done. My R200 (passively cooled, 256MB, 128-bit VGA+DVI) cost me 10 UKP. You might need to reconfigure and get a PCIe SATA card to free up the PCI slot depending on your configuration.

There's no magical legacy overlay feature that can be turned on for RadeonHD users since later RadeonHD cards don't have the feature. And why? Basically, because AMD decided it was obsolete and could find better use for the silicon. It has been replaced by video texturing. In order to use video texturing, you have to have working support for the hardware level 3D. If you can think of a method to implement it that requires no access to the 3D hardware on these cards, I'm sure Hans would love to hear from you as it would surely save him some development man hours.

Incidentally, I do find it strange that the people making the most noise about this aren't generally Sam users.

So, for Sam, A1, and Peg2 OS4 users Overlay is far from Obselete. Actually its Critical.

All I can say to you is re-read the various threads that have discussed this to death already and understand the difference between overlay as a concept, ie "hardware video surface" and "overlay" as the specific hardware implementation of that concept. Not a single person in any of the numerous threads across various forums has stated that "overlay" (hardware video surface) are obsolete, even if you have ample CPU power to do it all in software to a framebuffer.

[klx300r]

Incidentally, I do find it strange that the people making the most noise about this aren't generally Sam users.
.

cough cough, strange indeed as the same people show up on every OS4.x related thread as well.  Must be a strange fascination with new hardware or perhaps they are true AmigaOS4.x fans:razz:

[Karlos]

cough cough, strange indeed as the same people show up on every OS4.x related thread as well.

It's Piru's thread and it's not specifically about OS4. People barging in with (false) statements amounting to "SAM HAS NO POSSIBLE OVERLAY! OMGZOR SLOW VID 4EVR SUXXOR!11! TEH PEG2 FTW!!11!" and others turning it into which-developers-are-more-qualified-to-comment spoiled what was actually a perfectly reasonable discussion about the relative merits and implementation details of different methods of providing hardware assist for video playback.

[magnetic]

cough cough, strange indeed as the same people show up on every OS4.x related thread as well.  Must be a strange fascination with new hardware or perhaps they are true AmigaOS4.x fans:razz:

Well dont know how you are referring to as I run os4 on my peg2. And if you are referring to Piru than you are quite silly as he is quite an "expert"

[LoadWB]

These RadeonHD owners don't know they're born. In my day we had blinkenlights and we thought we were lucky...

I tried composting 720p on my Lite-Brite.

[magnetic]

@loadwb

lmao

I love lite brite btw

[Karlos]

I tried composting 720p on my Lite-Brite.

Great quality, but I hear the response time sucks

[itix]

Incidentally, I do find it strange that the people making the most noise about this aren't generally Sam users.

Indeed. But maybe if the performance was their biggest concern they would have chosen AmigaOne instead, no?