On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 4:39 PM, Florian Philipp <li...@binarywings.net> wrote: > Am 27.07.2012 22:22, schrieb Michael Mol: >> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Allan Gottlieb <gottl...@nyu.edu> wrote: >>> I am getting a new laptop. (likely dell 6430). >>> The two graphics options are intel HD 4000 and nvidia NVS 5200M. >>> Dell is as expected suggesting the 5200M. >>> >>> I do not need 3D or fast response. Dell hinted that DVDs might not play >>> with the intel HD 4000. This seems weird to me as the 4000 is supposed >>> to be a big improvement over the 3000 and I can't believe dell or others >>> would have sold laptops that can't play dvds >>> >>> Any comments or experiences? >> >> My Duron 750MHz was able to decode DVDs in realtime. After that, all >> you're doing is blitting (or using xv) the frames to the screen. I >> would be absolutely shocked if the Intel HD 4000 GPU couldn't handle >> that basic of a 2D acceleration function. >> >> Now, DVDs use MPEG2. Blu-Ray uses h.264, which is a much harder beast >> to decode in realtime. It's possible the HD 4000 GPU can't handle >> hardware decode of h.264, but I don't know. I've never looked into it. >> (Software decode of 1080p h.264 on my Phenom 9650 worked somewhat, but >> highly active scenes would cause frame drops.) >> > > I've experienced issues playing DVDs on fullscreen with the OSS radeon > driver. Therefore I'm cautious of assumptions that something works > simply because the input is easy to decode. Upscaling to large displays > with high resolutions can be an issue. > > I'm not saying the Intel driver cannot handle it. I'm just saying you > should try it or look for reports.
How high is 'high' resolution? I was upscaling to 1600x1200 using an a Radeon 9600; that card would now be almost ten years old. A bit later, I did the same on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 using an i845-based Intel graphics card. Here's the line from lspci, as run in May of 2007: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01) Hardware scaling a 2D image is one of the most trivial hardware-accelerated options GPUs perform. If someone had difficulties upscaling a 480p (roughly what DVDs are) to 1080p at 24 or 33fps, I would be very highly suspicious of a software misconfiguration. That kind of scaling should even be comfortably doable in software on any modern x86-derived processor. (With the plausible exclusion of the Atom CPU) -- :wq
