ATI & hardware accelerated drivers

[thermodynamic]

Howdy. Somebody, albeit back in March, made a claim that the ATi drivers for the new 2011 MBPs aren't hardware-accelerated for H.264 video.

Is that true? (Nobody responded to that person, which is a shame as - by now - a development surely would have taken place?)

http://forums.macworld.com/index.php?/topic/135441-review-macbook-pros-early-2011/page__st__14

And DVD is old and outdated. Even Powerbook G4 1.25Ghz could easily play DVD without any hardware acceleration. MacWorld should replace DVD with a movie encoded at BluRay quality, that means 1080p, codec H.264 at 30Mbps. With hardware acceleration battery life would be good.

I tested some clips and I was shocked that graphics drivers for my new 17" MacBook Pro do not support H.264 hardware offload. HD h.264 video decode is done on CPU even when I play clips in Quicktime X. Notebook gets got quickly while playing 1080p clip, fans are up in a minute.

Has MacWorld already inquired Apple when we can expect HW acceleration on the new line? Neither Intel HD neither ATI drivers seem to support H.264 hw acceleration.

That is a major omission these days when internet is full of videos. And people will then complain that Flash drains battery... and that solution is HTML5. Well not if drivers do not support GPU offload.

It is also a mistake MacWorld should not afford. MacWorld should clearly point out the deficiency. Hardware accelerated video is these days a MUST.
It is ironic that on my girlfriend's MacBook air same clip consumes just few % of CPU. Even greater difference in CPU usage is seen when Flash 10.2 is used.

(that poster is ignorant in that, while Flash is a mess, it's not HTML5 but H.264 that is the relevant CODEC and the video drivers, if they aren't by now, definitely need to be.)

 

[Mr. Wonderful]

Still no GPU acceleration for Flash, I know that much, but Apple has never supported that with AMD GPUs. I'm hoping that comes with Lion, especially with Apple pretty much completely migrating to AMD GPUs.

Edit: Just played a h.264-encoded blu-ray rip. CPU usage was only ~15%, so I would say acceleration is working with Quicktime.

 

[Icy1007]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Still no GPU acceleration for Flash, I know that much, but Apple has never supported that with AMD GPUs. I'm hoping that comes with Lion, especially with Apple pretty much completely migrating to AMD GPUs.

Edit: Just played a h.264-encoded blu-ray rip. CPU usage was only ~15%, so I would say acceleration is working with Quicktime.

I agree. Apple needs to add that with Lion if they are planning on switching exclusively to AMD gpus.

 

[thermodynamic]

Still no GPU acceleration for Flash, I know that much, but Apple has never supported that with AMD GPUs. I'm hoping that comes with Lion, especially with Apple pretty much completely migrating to AMD GPUs.

Edit: Just played a h.264-encoded blu-ray rip. CPU usage was only ~15%, so I would say acceleration is working with Quicktime.

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)



I agree. Apple needs to add that with Lion if they are planning on switching exclusively to AMD gpus.

Thanks, y'all!

Especially as they do hype up h.264 as if there's no tomorrow, it's utterly bizarre they don't include AMD's GPUs - I found out, on Apple's support site, that Intel's HD 3000 GPU **does** have accelerated drivers, but for them to ignore AMD's GPUs is mind-boggling.

But given they've been selling AMD GPUs for the 2009 Mac Pro, 2011 MBPs and iMacs, etc, it's very very odd that they have not been working on h.264 acceleration. Especially as Apple has total control over their platform, to not include H.264 acceleration -- :facepalm: .