Our Experience with UVD and R600
It's easy to point to the presentations and say, "look, this is slightly misleading." This doesn't get across the even more convincing interactions we had with AMD personnel over the course of reviewing the HD 2900 XT. Hopefully this will help to illuminate the issue further. I'll have to put a disclaimer on this and say that I don't have a photographic memory and I forgot to bring my diary to the press briefing. This isn't normally the kind of stuff I take notes on for product launches.
At the AMD press event in Tunis, Tunisia (we still can't figure out why we went to Africa to talk about a graphics card), myself and a couple other reviewers had the good fortune of being able to see HD Decode first hand. We watched a side by side comparison of an R6xx based part and a G8x based part with interesting results that mostly pointed out the long way Intervideo and CyberLink have to go in refining their player software. We were under the impression that this was R600, though clarification was not provided.
We talked about UVD and PureVideo, and we were asked if a video decode comparison would be made against NVIDIA hardware for our HD 2900 XT launch article. Upon replying in the affirmative, we got the impression that we should expect the R600 to outperform its competition (the 8800 GTS) in video decode tests. This doesn't seem as certain without UVD, but our marketing speak filters failed to pick up on anything out of the ordinary.
Moving on, we were initially told to expect a driver to enable video decode acceleration shortly before launch. AMD also provided us with a copy of PowerDVD which was said to support AVIVO HD. We did get a newer driver near launch, but in testing it we saw very bad video decode performance. It turns out that we couldn't test video decode at all, as hardware acceleration was not enabled in our press driver. This indicates to us that, even though we saw decode acceleration working in Tunis, AMD was having more trouble than expected in the QA department.
We would expect QA issue with new UVD hardware. If we've got the same video decode hardware as a previous generation part, it seems a little odd to think that we wouldn't have a driver or software to enable the feature.
In going back through our slides for this piece, we noticed that it is explicitly stated that UVD is included on the Radeon Mobility HD 2300. This is an R5xx based part retrofitted with UVD. Of all the parts not to have this new feature, the DX9 class Mobility HD 2300 would have been the one we thought of first. Surely if this part has the new feature, the HD 2900 XT should also include it. The argument for not is, again, that higher end GPUs tend to be paired with CPUs that can handle the workload.
The reason we offer time and again for the fact that G86 and G84 include full video decode while G80 does not is that the slower parts had 6 months more development time. In NVIDIA's case, it makes complete sense that G80 would lack the more refined video decode hardware. For AMD to launch a top to bottom product line and leave a feature like this out of their highest end part is very strange.
So strange, in fact, that combined with all the other experiences we've had with this rather surreal product launch we still just can't help but doubt what we're hearing. To us, the most sensible explanation for all this is that the hardware must be there but is somehow broken - perhaps broken to the point that it will never be fixed on current silicon (i.e. via drivers) and a new spin would be required to address the problems.
In spite of what makes sense to us, AMD has indicated that UVD hardware is not at all present on R600. Their "official" statement has yet to appear, but we'll update this article when/if we get it.
It's easy to point to the presentations and say, "look, this is slightly misleading." This doesn't get across the even more convincing interactions we had with AMD personnel over the course of reviewing the HD 2900 XT. Hopefully this will help to illuminate the issue further. I'll have to put a disclaimer on this and say that I don't have a photographic memory and I forgot to bring my diary to the press briefing. This isn't normally the kind of stuff I take notes on for product launches.
At the AMD press event in Tunis, Tunisia (we still can't figure out why we went to Africa to talk about a graphics card), myself and a couple other reviewers had the good fortune of being able to see HD Decode first hand. We watched a side by side comparison of an R6xx based part and a G8x based part with interesting results that mostly pointed out the long way Intervideo and CyberLink have to go in refining their player software. We were under the impression that this was R600, though clarification was not provided.
We talked about UVD and PureVideo, and we were asked if a video decode comparison would be made against NVIDIA hardware for our HD 2900 XT launch article. Upon replying in the affirmative, we got the impression that we should expect the R600 to outperform its competition (the 8800 GTS) in video decode tests. This doesn't seem as certain without UVD, but our marketing speak filters failed to pick up on anything out of the ordinary.
Moving on, we were initially told to expect a driver to enable video decode acceleration shortly before launch. AMD also provided us with a copy of PowerDVD which was said to support AVIVO HD. We did get a newer driver near launch, but in testing it we saw very bad video decode performance. It turns out that we couldn't test video decode at all, as hardware acceleration was not enabled in our press driver. This indicates to us that, even though we saw decode acceleration working in Tunis, AMD was having more trouble than expected in the QA department.
We would expect QA issue with new UVD hardware. If we've got the same video decode hardware as a previous generation part, it seems a little odd to think that we wouldn't have a driver or software to enable the feature.
In going back through our slides for this piece, we noticed that it is explicitly stated that UVD is included on the Radeon Mobility HD 2300. This is an R5xx based part retrofitted with UVD. Of all the parts not to have this new feature, the DX9 class Mobility HD 2300 would have been the one we thought of first. Surely if this part has the new feature, the HD 2900 XT should also include it. The argument for not is, again, that higher end GPUs tend to be paired with CPUs that can handle the workload.
The reason we offer time and again for the fact that G86 and G84 include full video decode while G80 does not is that the slower parts had 6 months more development time. In NVIDIA's case, it makes complete sense that G80 would lack the more refined video decode hardware. For AMD to launch a top to bottom product line and leave a feature like this out of their highest end part is very strange.
So strange, in fact, that combined with all the other experiences we've had with this rather surreal product launch we still just can't help but doubt what we're hearing. To us, the most sensible explanation for all this is that the hardware must be there but is somehow broken - perhaps broken to the point that it will never be fixed on current silicon (i.e. via drivers) and a new spin would be required to address the problems.
In spite of what makes sense to us, AMD has indicated that UVD hardware is not at all present on R600. Their "official" statement has yet to appear, but we'll update this article when/if we get it.
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DerekWilson - Tuesday, June 12, 2007 - link
At the Tunis even, if members of the press specifically asked AMD, they were told that UVD was not in the 2900 XT.Aside from us, there were quite a few publications at the Tunis event that did not have correct information becaues we didn't specifically ask someone.
The presentations and slides were absolutely not clear on the issue, and there is no slide that does make it clear that UVD is not in the 2900 XT. Period.
Not mentioning it as a feature is not the same as mentioning that something is not a feature.
lemonadesoda - Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - link
Then, Mr Wilson, you have to admit that there are better reporters/journalists representing other publications. Why do you write a 3 page article whining about the fact that you weren't SPOON FED all the information... and that because you didn't get your facts right... you continue to write copy with FUD.Not only is the content of this article poor, you could have written it with 80% less words. Do you get paid on a per word basis?
DerekWilson - Sunday, July 22, 2007 - link
If we had to explicitly confirm everything that was implied, we would never publish an article. We don't want to be spoon fed, but we don't need to be mislead (whether on purpose or by accident). It's slightly more costly to the manufacturers who's boxes were printed as supporting UVD than for us, which really underlines the fact that AMD made a mistake somewhere along the way here.I don't get paid per word -- I do tend to be wordy though. Sorry about that.