Forums | MacLife

Heh.

Truthfully, this will come down a bit to what we prefer, and as a ATI fanboy, I'd recommend a Sapphire HD 3650. It's cheap ($60, and you can get an additional $15 off with a MIR), it's quiet, it uses less power than Nvidia's comparable midrange GPU's, and you could play some games on it if you wanted to.

...altho it should be pointed out that the line between functions isn't as clear as you might think. The same shader units used primarily for advanced gaming visuals are also tapped for more general purposes, such as calculations in F@H and, yes, in video post-processing. In general, that's why a low-end chip like the HD 2400 doesn't have the image quality of its bigger brother 2600- more shader units.

Since the last time we tested HD playback performance on the 8600 line, we have seen software support improve dramatically. PowerDVD, especially, has come quite a long way and now fully supports both AMD and NVIDIA hardware with full hardware acceleration and is quite stable. Drivers from both camps have also now added HD video quality improvements in the form of post processing to their drivers. HD deinterlacing and noise reduction now (mostly) work as we would expect. This is in contrast to the across the board scores of 0 under HD HQV we saw earlier this year.

This will be the first time we test AMD's new R600 and RV6xx based graphics cards using our video decode tests. Our RV6xx based Radeon HD 2600 and 2400 hardware features AMD's UVD video decode pipeline that accelerates 100% of the HD video decode process on all codecs supported by HD-DVD and Blu-ray. NVIDIA's hardware falls short of AMD's offering in the VC-1 bitstream decoding department, as it leaves this task up to the CPU. We will try to evaluate just how much of an impact this difference will really offer end users.

...

With video decode hardware built in as a separate block of logic and post processing being handled by the shader hardware, it's clear that the horrendous 3D performance of low end parts has bled through to their video processing capability as well. This is quite disturbing, as it removes quite a bit of potential value from low cost cards that include video decode hardware.

HD Video Decode Quality and Performance Summer '07

Article's a good start. Most current cards offload video decode of even HD content (tho ATi is still ahead in offloading bitstream processing of the less-demanding VC-1 codec). Drivers have improved, e.g. ATi does now offer adjustments to its post-processing at the driver level... takeway, tho, if you want 'really excellent' video playback, esp. at very high res, more is still better, tho the point of diminishing returns sets in lower than for gaming purposes. You don't need high end, but you might consider going upscale from the $60 level.

I don't know if it's too late, but here goes.  If you're running the card in Windows, anything with Avivo or Pure Video 2 (PV2) (and the appropriate software) should suffice -- In OS X, otoh, there's no acceleration for advanced codecs, but your CPU should be powerful enough to do everything in software anyway.

Also (if you plan on running OS X) you still might want a better GPU.  You can get a good gaming card for around $150 (I know you don't game) but this would also accelerate Core Image apps (if you're into video editing and whatnot).  It will also help accelerate OpenCL which utilizes the GPU's massive parallel processing capabilities to accelerate general purpose tasks (this may or may not be a big deal).  One final bit of information is that Core Image favors ATi.

The good news is that even if you somehow pick the "wrong" card, it'll be cheap to fix.

Mr. T wrote:

I don't know if it's too late, but here goes.  If you're running the card in Windows, anything with Avivo or Pure Video 2 (PV2) (and the appropriate software) should suffice -- In OS X, otoh, there's no acceleration for advanced codecs, but your CPU should be powerful enough to do everything in software anyway.

Avivo HD. There's a difference, and software modes don't provide the video image quality of the better cards, with all their shaders, esp. in the $150 and up range.

Also (if you plan on running OS X) you still might want a better GPU.  You can get a good gaming card for around $150 (I know you don't game) but this would also accelerate Core Image apps (if you're into video editing and whatnot).  It will also help accelerate OpenCL which utilizes the GPU's massive parallel processing capabilities to accelerate general purpose tasks (this may or may not be a big deal).  One final bit of information is that Core Image favors ATi.

Heck, he could've gotten that here and here, with their respective sourcing.