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Lion has H264 hardware decoding on HD5870!

I

iBug2

macrumors 601
Original poster
While SL had the hardware decoding feature only on 9400M and 320M chipsets, Lion does have this for dedicated GPU cards it seems. With my HD5870, while playing a 1080p Quicktime movie, CPU usage is 7%.
 
I have a Intel GMA X3100 (integrated) and I had the same 7% while playing a 720p h264 Matroska (mkv) file using VLC (64bit and no subtitles).
 
Scrap that, I'm sorry. There's no hardware decoding. The CPU usage is low by player but there's a decoder service active while playing the movie which takes around 40% CPU.
 
iBug2 said:
Scrap that, I'm sorry. There's no hardware decoding. The CPU usage is low by player but there's a decoder service active while playing the movie which takes around 40% CPU.
Click to expand...
Hehe, I was about to suggest looking at that other process... I fell for it too 🙄.
 
iBug2 said:
While SL had the hardware decoding feature only on 9400M and 320M chipsets, Lion does have this for dedicated GPU cards it seems. With my HD5870, while playing a 1080p Quicktime movie, CPU usage is 7%.
Click to expand...

Apples developer documentation for the VDA API says:
"This reference describes the Video Decode Acceleration framework available on Mac OS X v10.6.3 and later with Mac models equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M, GeForce GT 330M, ATI HD Radeon GFX, Intel HD Graphics and others."

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2267/_index.html

IIRC, all NVIDIA and AMD/ATI GPUs from the past >= 2 years have H.264 and VC-1 decoder units to decode downloaded high definition (720p & 1080p) videos and the content of Blu-Ray disks (MPEG-2, H.264 or VC-1).

Apples DVD player uses the much older MPEG-2 decoder units now for a very long time (around 5-10 years, IIRC). Apple could also implement the support for WMV9 (VC-1) with nearly zero effort. This would make Flip4Mac (which is NOT hardware accelerated) superfluous.
 
HD4850 has it too...

Yep. This came with the Snow Leopard "Graphics Update" for ATI cards and some Nvidia cards.

Try this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XITHbsUUlYI

That video used to be literally unplayable at 1080 on nearly any Mac. My old G5 2.5 could play it but only barely because I had an nVidia GTX 7800GS.

Watch this at HD1080P. CPU with nothing else running was 6-7% on my iMac i7 2.8ghz.
 
Last edited:
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