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It is true that it's more important for the NV chipset to have HD hardware decode enabled than MPs because they are less powerful and hardware decode uses much less battery power as well- but it's nice in any case.

12GB... So it's like downloading and patching WoW then...

Bat wrote:

The cablecos are doing their best to cap that- not because bandwidth is truly expense, but because watching on home computer threatens their (very profitable) cable TV business. That's really what the bandwidth caps are about.

At the same time, services like Hulu are talking openly now about the end of free service. Not immediately, but in the foreseeable.

Bandwidth caps really interfere with streaming media as a BD alternative when one BD carries ~25GB. And BD sales are finally rising.

Anyway, H.264 is the usual codec family for streaming solutions, too, due to the high compression.

(...unless it's Mark's beloved...Flash. )

Yes it is a viscous circle of competition for sure.  Doing one thing cuts into something else and on and on.

For the record I have no problems with Flash Video aka FLV; it can actually rival H.264 using the latest On2 codecs.  The media encoder included with the CS4 production suite is very nice.

I just hate "Flash" because 9 times out of 10 it is a pointless bandwidth gobbler.

-mark

jerwin wrote:

"Well Encoded" begs the question. Certainly, there are inefficient encoding schemes that waste bandwidth without improving visual quality. Bluray supports 40 Mb/sec compression, and in some cases, using a lower compression ratio discards visual detail. The benchmarks Bat pointed out used a high bandwidth H.264 clip for one of the tests.

One seemed to peak at 54, IIRC.

I've seen H.264 encodes (vs. .flv) vary from a bit smaller than Flash with better quality, say YT HQ, to nearly twice the size, FWIW.

If a low bandwidth encode requires filtering out the grain, it's not worth it.

That's another area the advanced video features of the more recent cards/chips can come into play- not via the dedicated decode chip, but via the shaders (specifically the pixel shading function). They're potentially useful for a lot more than gaming; cleaning up, sharpening, smoothing video streams can be very useful to even non-gamers if properly supported by software. It looks like Quicktime-X might harness that on the Mac at last.

The more pixel-shading capability you have, the higher the potential res/quality/framerate.

DX7 chips had a fixed-function T&L pipeline, and weren't useful for this. DX8 chips introduced programmable shaders, pixel and vertex, but operated at the integer level. DX9 chips upped that to FP-accurate internal color and a much wider instruction set, -10 introduced hardware with Unified shaders (no more pixel and vertex shaders; all were equal) and the Geometry Shader function. DX11 will add the Compute Shader function that OpenCL/ Stream/ CUDA will find most useful, tho -10 parts can do some of that now. And yes, if proper extensions are present and used well, OpenGL can do much the same things, it's just that OGL has had trouble keeping pace with DX, and the implementation on your platform is vital, too. Khronos disappointed quite a few with OGL 3.0, but at least they're trying.
==

Anyhoo, Barefeats has some new benches on the 285.

June 16th, 2009 -- GeForce GTX 285 on Nehalem Mac Pro running Pro Apps

June 18th, 2009 -- GeForce GTX 285 on Nehalem Mac Pro running 3D apps under Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

By the way, netkas has a kext that will allow generic PC versions of the 285 to work on a real, genuine Mac Pro.  So Mac Pro users can save a boatload of cash without the trouble/risk associated with flashing.

netkas

Bat wrote:

jerwin wrote:

If a low bandwidth encode requires filtering out the grain, it's not worth it.

That's another area the advanced video features of the more recent cards/chips can come into play- not via the dedicated decode chip, but via the shaders (specifically the pixel shading function). They're potentially useful for a lot more than gaming; cleaning up, sharpening, smoothing video streams can be very useful to even non-gamers if properly supported by software

I think you have misunderstood. Grain is a part of film. If filtered out prior to beginning the encoding process, less bits are required. However, the filtering process itself destroys detail, and of course grain, which rankles film purists.