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ATI Hardware Acceleration of H.264
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SPUY767 said:
Quicktime 7 will be available on PC shortly, and soon H.264 will be built into Windows Media Player, so it doesn't fully proove these new ATI cards will be for Mac. You can also encode H.264 on the PC using some apps too. Plus the Mac video market is very small.
This is good news to hear,
As for the encoding since Apple seem to be moving calculations over to the GPU anyway with Core Image/Video you can bet that once this thing is out they will speed up the encoding time, after all it still takes a fair while on a G5 so they will want to give this performance to their pro systems
As for the encoding since Apple seem to be moving calculations over to the GPU anyway with Core Image/Video you can bet that once this thing is out they will speed up the encoding time, after all it still takes a fair while on a G5 so they will want to give this performance to their pro systems
Once this technology makes its way into all the Macs, multi-way iChats will be far less processor-intensive. This will also open the door for more than 4-way video chat in iChat, as well as new H.264-related video effects that simply weren't possible before. Great news, I'd say...
manu chao said:
Um... check out the green sphere.
This is very exciting news. This should really improve playback and encoding, as Core Video would offload QT encoding to the GPU. Sweet.
-Chase
Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray can use a WMV-based codec, H.264, or even a mixture of the two!evilbert420 said:
AGP
Will it be released as an AGP card though - isn't everyone going nuts over this PCI express thing?
Will it be released as an AGP card though - isn't everyone going nuts over this PCI express thing?
Untrue, H.264 was available on the PC before Tiger and QuickTime 7. Third-party PC applications like Nero support both H.264 and HE-AAC (audio) and several downloadable utilities work with H.264 (on both PCs and Macs).SPUY767 said:
In any case, just because an ATI card supports (or will support) H.264 in hardware does not automatically mean that it will be supported on Macs. You can bet that it will appear on PCs first, then __maybe__ it will get support on the Mac. Look, even today Macs have very little support for hardware (video card or GPU) accelerated MPEG2, on the Mac its done mostly in software. Macs have seldom taken advantage of the hardware MPEG2 or DVD support that exists in many GPUs, so why does anyone think it will be different with H.264?
wrldwzrd89 said:
Okay, I understand the concept that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are physical specs, and WMV or H.264 is the software/encoding specs.. but isn't a standard codec MORE important than a standard hardware format? I mean, standard codec means the "delivery platform" shouldn't matter... download, streaming, or read off an optical drive...
Will these cards likely go back to 8x AGP?
It seems all of the mid-level PCs (over $1000 Dells and the like) now use PCI-16x graphics cards. Does it seem likely that new cards are going to be made also on the AGP 8x standard?
I've seen the technology move leave me behind - AGP 4x in my dulie 1.42, so I can get a 128 MB ATI 9800, but not the edition with 256 MB (8x only).
I suppose the possible architecture (still wondering if the RAM-type will change, too) changes are just around the corner, week after next.
It seems all of the mid-level PCs (over $1000 Dells and the like) now use PCI-16x graphics cards. Does it seem likely that new cards are going to be made also on the AGP 8x standard?
I've seen the technology move leave me behind - AGP 4x in my dulie 1.42, so I can get a 128 MB ATI 9800, but not the edition with 256 MB (8x only).
I suppose the possible architecture (still wondering if the RAM-type will change, too) changes are just around the corner, week after next.