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Anonymous

Question

Why do ATI Radeon HD 2xxx/3xxx cards get no H.264 hardware decode support for Flash Player 10.1?

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
November 19, 2009
3 replies
19610 views

I have a ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro card, and it supports H.264 hardware decoding. How come only ATI Radeon HD 4xxx cards and higher only get support for H.264 hardware decoding for Flash Player 10.1?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Participant

Well, the original poster was asking about H.264 video acceleration, not 2d/3d acceleration for flash games. With regards to video acceleration, DivX HiQ works quite nicely. I doubt there will ever be a solution for 2d/3d flash games, because of the latency that would be introduced

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Anonymous

Well, Flash Player 10.2 completely separating the flash video rendering process and the flash 3d/2d graphics process is their solution to improve this latency. With flash video and flash 3d/2d graphics being rendered separately and completely independent of each other in Flash Player 10.2, I've noticed lesser CPU usage. Although the original poster was talking about H.264 video acceleration, the fact Flash Player 10.2 is designed for both separated handling of flash video and flash 3d/2d graphics which is why the required graphics card must handle flash video and flash 3d/2d graphics independently of each in separate hardware components on the card.

Participating Frequently

Well, when I run DXVA checker I get that my card is capable of: ModeH264_VLD_NoFGT.

The acceleration modes are like this:

the higher the letter the more acceleration there is:
Mode A post-processing,
Mode B Motion Compensation
Mode C inverse discrete cosine transform
Mode D Variable Length Decoder ( full bitstream decode acceleration except for MPEG-2 where it means something else).

FGT is film grain technology, which allows film grain to be reintroduced on video which has had it removed.

I was told that:

"You have H.264 full acceleration upto 1080p ( Mode D ), WMV9 Mode A (post-proc) upto 720p, VC1 in Mode D,VC-1 full bitstream decode ( Variable Length Decoder, Mode D ) and MPEG-2 Modes C & D ( iDCT for unencrypted and encrypted video )...."

I still can't see why YouTube would not be capable to run accelerated on Radeon series 2&3.

Participant

DivX HiQ works fine for my HD 3850. Obviously Adobe is willing to let a competitor step in and take away some of their market share.

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Anonymous

I think it's a bit unfair to compare Divx to Adobe Flash because Divx is just video and Adobe Flash is not just video, but also 3D/2D graphics. In Adobe Flash player 10.2 and higher, the Flash player is designed to create the video and 3D/2D graphics completely separately in two layers by two completely independent separate hardware components on the graphics card. Graphics cards with the UVD/UVD+ decoder hardware component like the HD 3850 make flash video using both the UVD/UVD+ decoder hardware component and the 3D/2D graphics component on the video card, and so flash video cannot be made in separate hardware components from the flash 2d/3d graphics. The UVD2 hardware component on Radeon HD 4xxx and higher graphics cards allows for making flash video on the UVD2 hardware component being completely independent and separate from the other hardware component making the flash 3D/2D graphics on the same card.

Participating Frequently

Adobe won't answer you because they don't care. Unless they can line their pockets by doing so, they won't help you. Its terrible.

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Anonymous

Yeah, thanks for the info, man, but I kind of figured this already when they haven't responded in a couple of months. In any case, I found out with a little research on my own getting me to choose to upgrade to an ATI Radeon HD 4xxx Series Card. Basically, the ATI Radeon HD 2xxx/3xxx with the UVD decoder doesn't use full enough mpeg4/h.264 hardware decoding support, and so you need ATI cards with more full mpeg4/h.264 hardware support where those would be cards with the UVD2 decoder. Those UVD2 decoder would be ATI Radeon HD 4xxx and higher. The funny thing is when I asked ATI tech support way back about this, they didn't know anything involving the Adobe Flash player support even though one of their most recent video card driver updates is said to include support for Adobe Flash player 10.1 beta. ATI tech support also told me to contact Adobe. If Adobe doesn't want to help with questions about system requirements about their software, their loss because that kind of info would help their users of their software understand the video card requirements. I think it's gonna become a lot tougher to play high quality flash video with older video cards with HD flash video appearing more and more, and I think the Adobe Flash player 10.1 release may suffer when a lot of users aren't able to use hardware acceleration support for not meeting the minimum requirements of newer video cards.

Participating Frequently

Did a bit of research man and looking into that whole UVD arguement, and it doesnt hold. The desktop 3xxx series card has UVD+ whereas the 2xxx series only has UVD which would mean that running 10.1 on a 2xxx card would be a big ask. Which is fine since the 2xxx series is really old.

Now what I also found out is the mobility radeon 3xxx series is also UVD+ so the desktop 3xxx should be supported also! Since Adobe themselves state that integrated 3xxx series is supported.

Also i found out that hd3200 chips that are integrated into motherboards that are also apparently supported only have UVD (not UVD+ or UVD2).

All the info i found was on the following wiki link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder

Seems like either one of Adobe or AMD are holding out on everyone. It may even be both.