Published in Graphics

AMD?s UVD does all decoding in hardware

by on01 November 2007

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Nvidia was wrong, says AMD


We created a lot of uproar with our “Nvidia claims G98/D8M has the best HD decoder” article that you can read here.  After a conference call with AMD, AMD went on the record and told us that “AMD’s Unified Video Decoder is the best thing on the market, better than Nvidia's, including the one in G92."

ATI can do full hardware decoding for H.264 & VC-1 on the HD 2600, HD 2400 and upcoming RV670 cards. AMD said that  ATI Radeon HD series GPUs enable full bitstream decoding of H.264 and VC-1 with absolute minimum CPU loading and system power consumption. Decryption of protected content is implemented in the hardware in accordance with protection rules attached to the content, insuring best video decoding performance, but for intellectual property protection reasons they did not want to reveal the details as to how they exactly did it.

This is a company proprietary process that AMD must protect, for obvious reasons. ATI still has to test VP3 in G98, but as the product is still not available AMD compared its new hardware, including RV670, and in the VC1 content playback we’ve seen that ATI is dramatically better than both 8800 GT and 8600 GTS. We will tell you about this in a separate article and we will try to conduct some tests ourselves.

It is also interesting to note that 8800 GT, 8600, 8500 and the current 8400 generation powered with VP2 do the VLC entropy decode on a CPU, while HD 2600, HD 2400 and RV670 do this on a GPU. Video wars will continue and this is far from over.

More to come soon, including some RV670 scores, so stay tuned.

Last modified on 01 November 2007
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