For sure Perian was not installed on any of my systems. Also, of note, playing the same H.264 trailer on a Quad Core (2.66GHz, 12MB L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB) produces 40-50% CPU usage, whereas the MacBook Pro produces 100-110% CPU usage and the MacBook does not exceed 20% CPU usage.
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Apple Enabled GPU Hardware Decoding of h.264 on New MacBooks, Pros and Airs?
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For sure Perian was not installed on any of my systems. Also, of note, playing the same H.264 trailer on a Quad Core (2.66GHz, 12MB L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB) produces 40-50% CPU usage, whereas the MacBook Pro produces 100-110% CPU usage and the MacBook does not exceed 20% CPU usage.
Thanks for confirmation, it indeed would seem they have finally enabled the acceleration for sure, glad to hear it and hope they do enabled it for everyone that can get benefit from it, though I've just ordered a new MBP, so I'm good.
First, ffmpeg does use vector instructions. See this as an example of using the Altivec instruction set.
Second, some of them are capable of using the GPU, see this new addition to ffmpeg.
In my experience using Handbrake, even though the software uses close to 200% of CPU time on my dual core MacBook, the machine stays perfectly usable. The encoding runs at lowest priority, which means as soon as you need the CPU for anything else, Handbrake lets go of the CPU.
In my 12" PB (1.5ghz) I get consistent load averages of 4.5-5.0. What you said applies to even older computers too; even at these load averages I'm having the same result. I can still browse web pages, etc without any issues while doing CPU encoding with Handbrake. However, hardware encoding would be rather nice; it'd be worth getting a new computer just for that.
This news is both exciting and troubling at the same time as this is sort of the unfinished promise of Leopard, but it appears there's going to be a haves and have-NOTS situation with the functionality, which is very bad in my opinion.
Snow Leopard should be renamed SNOW-JOB LEOPARD, or the Leopard Apple meant to sell you but couldn't finish in time in the first place.
Think of all the installed base of Macs out there with ATI Radeon 9xxx, X800, X1900+ and Nvidia Geforce 6xxx, 7xxx, & 8xxx technology in their Macs that could take advantage of this oh so easily. But, I seriously suspect Apple is going to leave Leopard crippled forever for those machines even though some of them were ridiculously expensive Macs at the time.
Yes, you PowerPC G5 & older iMac & Powerbook owners, forget it, we took your $129 and ran.
We don't care that you kept us afloat during our dark years, we're making oodles and oodles of money now and don't need you PPC people that spent $4000 on a Mac way way back.
Yes, we know Leopard runs like a DOG on PowerPC machines, but we don't sell PPC Macs anymore, so F U, GO BUY A NEW MAC and stop whining about how sloooooooooow Leopard is !
Thank you Apple, NOT!
Snow Leopard should be renamed SNOW-JOB LEOPARD, or the Leopard Apple meant to sell you but couldn't finish in time in the first place.
Think of all the installed base of Macs out there with ATI Radeon 9xxx, X800, X1900+ and Nvidia Geforce 6xxx, 7xxx, & 8xxx technology in their Macs that could take advantage of this oh so easily. But, I seriously suspect Apple is going to leave Leopard crippled forever for those machines even though some of them were ridiculously expensive Macs at the time.
Yes, you PowerPC G5 & older iMac & Powerbook owners, forget it, we took your $129 and ran.
We don't care that you kept us afloat during our dark years, we're making oodles and oodles of money now and don't need you PPC people that spent $4000 on a Mac way way back.
Yes, we know Leopard runs like a DOG on PowerPC machines, but we don't sell PPC Macs anymore, so F U, GO BUY A NEW MAC and stop whining about how sloooooooooow Leopard is !
Thank you Apple, NOT!
This news is both exciting and troubling at the same time as this is sort of the unfinished promise of Leopard, but it appears there's going to be a haves and have-NOTS situation with the functionality, which is very bad in my opinion.
Snow Leopard should be renamed SNOW-JOB LEOPARD, or the Leopard Apple meant to sell you but couldn't finish in time in the first place.
Think of all the installed base of Macs out there with ATI Radeon 9xxx, X800, X1900+ and Nvidia Geforce 6xxx, 7xxx, & 8xxx technology in their Macs that could take advantage of this oh so easily. But, I seriously suspect Apple is going to leave Leopard crippled forever for those machines even though some of them were ridiculously expensive Macs at the time.
Yes, you PowerPC G5 & older iMac & Powerbook owners, forget it, we took your $129 and ran.
We don't care that you kept us afloat during our dark years, we're making oodles and oodles of money now and don't need you PPC people that spent $4000 on a Mac way way back.
Yes, we know Leopard runs like a DOG on PowerPC machines, but we don't sell PPC Macs anymore, so F U, GO BUY A NEW MAC and stop whining about how sloooooooooow Leopard is !
Thank you Apple, NOT!
I understand and mostly agree with your sentiment here. The way drivers work, if Apple enables it on the new machines it should for the most part automagically work on the other machines that have hardware to support. If we notice that it's only enabled on the new machines, then more than likely Apple has purposely kept it disabled on the older, albeit capable, hardware. It would be very poor form for Apple to do something like that.
it should be noted that the only mac chipsets shipping currently supporting full h264 acceleration are the 8600/9400/9600 and ati 2600, should apple choose to enable such on older systems, anything older than those would only be able to assist in decoding I believe, not actually do the decoding., though I believe the ati x1600 has some level of support, but I think it may be limited to 720p content only.
The program that was used in the screenshot was smcFanControl. It's main purpose is to control fan speed, but it just so happens to show temperature and fan speed in the menu bar.
Point well taken, so I double checked all of the graphics card series I previously listed and discovered I was wrong with the Radeon 9800. All the others support H.264 decode assistance, but yes not full decoding.
However it's been previously mentioned that Apple is NOT using ANY assistance from any graphics cards I mentioned for decode assistance in Leopard as we speak, even for DVD Player of all things!
This is simply inexcusable IMHO and sort of makes Leopard's Core Image/Core Animation promises an empty promise, except for the "chosen few."
Oh, and it should be noted that some of those chosen few include WINDOWS users thanks to Microsoft & NVIDIA!
I didnt read through this entire thread to find if this was mentioned or not, so, sorry.
FWIW, on my buddys 8-Core MP, under Leopard, playing back a 1080p Apple trailer, CPU usage hovers around 60%. Under Vista Ultimate, using Media Player Classic and ffdshow, playing back the same trailer we see no more then 17% CPU usage.
Can someone explain to why Quicktime in OS X needs so much CPU power to decode these trailers?
FWIW, on my buddys 8-Core MP, under Leopard, playing back a 1080p Apple trailer, CPU usage hovers around 60%. Under Vista Ultimate, using Media Player Classic and ffdshow, playing back the same trailer we see no more then 17% CPU usage.
Can someone explain to why Quicktime in OS X needs so much CPU power to decode these trailers?
As an Apple user since 1983, it pains me to say this, but I suspect the truth is that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard CORE IMAGE & CORE ANIMATION are a product of Steve Jobs reality distortion field and not in fact using the graphics card's assistance as sort of implicitly promised.
Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong. I'd actually like to be wrong on this, but the more I read about this story, the more the facts seem to make Apple look really really bad.
And yes, all of the video cards I mentioned previously will use decode assistance within not only Windows Vista, but also to some extent in XP, but NOT LEOPARD!
This is very sad and makes Snow Leopard look like a bug fix you have to pay for.
And for some, a bug fix they will never get which is even worse if you're a PowerPC Mac owner of a $4000 machine!
Most likely the video drivers in Windows are offloading much of the processing to your friend video card (as they should). OSX doesn't seem to fully utilize the video card and all the processing must be done on the processor(s).
You might want to start here.
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/6439706/
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/6439743/
H.264 decoding is a very specific feature of a video card. Core Image and Core Animation don't need that feature to work. And what CI and CA really do is let you leverage OpenGL and shaders implicitly in your application for more general-purpose things like image filters and transitions/animation in the windowing system. Without CI/CA, you have to write a lot of infrastructure yourself, but using the GPU for image processing and animating your windows/views/controls is still possible. Apple's intent was to bake it in and make it accessible to developers. Core Video doesn't even use GPU assistance for decoding, but rather lets you use CI filters on a video stream after it is decoded as a developer.
The real deal is that H.264 hardware decoding != CI/CA. All three are different beasts for different purposes, implemented differently, and using different parts of the GPU for each.
Apple has trumpeted that CI will use the graphics card in most cases (those cases where the video card has the shader support for the shader instructions CI uses), and it isn't just an implicit promise, it was explicit. Filters for CI are written in a special scripting language because of it, and get that nice boost from running on the GPU.
Apple has not gone out trumpeting that H.264 was decoded in hardware on their machines. If that were the case, someone would have an argument for false advertising.
As it stands, I don't see what this thread has to do with CI/CA in the first place. The technologies are very different.
Any speculation as to whether or not the lower CPU utilization may be due (at least in part) to Apple using a new version of Quicktime that's SSE4 optimized?
Remember back when just after the Penryn release when a few DivX 6.6 tests were showing some really nice gains for the SSE4 enable processors, such as 200% better encoding times and 40% greater frame-rates vs. previous processors and SSE3? The real-world problem then was the almost total lack of SSE4 optimized apps... but even now, there's still few to be found in either the Windows or Mac worlds. Many current apps are just at SSE2...
Remember back when just after the Penryn release when a few DivX 6.6 tests were showing some really nice gains for the SSE4 enable processors, such as 200% better encoding times and 40% greater frame-rates vs. previous processors and SSE3? The real-world problem then was the almost total lack of SSE4 optimized apps... but even now, there's still few to be found in either the Windows or Mac worlds. Many current apps are just at SSE2...