First videocards to offer Video Acceleration?

[OBLIVIONLORD]

I know with Nvidia all the 6000 series on up offer video acceleration however what about the older cards? The geforce4 which is built off of Geforce 2.. This suposingly offers video acceleration but was it a feature that actually worked?

Did the Geforce2 offer video acceleration?

I cant find any history on video acceleration for videocards in general.

[SeasonalEclipse]

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

[OBLIVIONLORD]

Off that site ...

Under 1990..
"Video acceleration became popular as standards such as VCD and DVD arrived, and the Internet grew in popularity and speed."

Under Computational functions...
"Recent graphics cards even decode high-definition video on the card, taking some load off the central processing unit"

Doesn't really answer the question at all. Anyone else? Please

[PhysX]

for TnL it was the 8500 for ati, and gf2 for nvidia.

[aja]

for TnL it was the 8500 for ati, and gf2 for nvidia.

That would be classified as proper hardware acceleration, right?

[JamesXP]

an increasing public demand for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_acceleration). Early examples of mass-marketed 3D graphics hardware can be found in fifth generation video game consoles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_%28fifth_generation %29) such as PlayStation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation) and Nintendo 64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64). In the PC world, notable failed first-tries for low-cost 3D graphics chips were the S3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Graphics) ViRGE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViRGE), ATI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Technologies) Rage, and Matrox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox) Mystique. These chips were essentially previous-generation 2D accelerators with 3D features bolted on.



:)

[OBLIVIONLORD]

James I think your referring to 3d acceleration. Am I right?

What does TNL stand for?

It appears that ATI's Original Rage was the first to offer video acceleration.

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

"The original RAGE chip was based upon a Mach64 2D core with new 3D functionality and MPEG-1 acceleration."

S3's was this lineup

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Graphics

"S3 Vision868, Vision968 - S3's first motion video accelerator (zoom and YUV->RGB conversion)"

For Nvidia it was the Geforce 256..

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

"It ran at 120 MHz and was also implemented with advanced video acceleration, motion compensation, hardware sub picture alpha-blending, and had four-pixel pipelines."

I can't find anything from Matrox or 3dfx. If anyone else has any info then that would help. Thanks

More good info on early video acceleration.
http://www.byte.com/art/9502/sec11/art2.htm

[Mpegger]

And just a little more information for those that reply, the OP, OBLIVIONLORD, is asking for VIDEO (ie, mpeg video) acceleration, NOT 3D acceleration.

Btw, dunno if this would count, but I do have a Orchid Kelvin MPEG card from back in the 486 days. It was a standard VESA compatible card that used the VL-Bus with a built in hardware MPEG1 decoder. This was when full screen (320x240) video motion capture was just started being used in games, like The 7th Guest, and the hardware was incapable of handling decoding mpeg1 streams.

The next video acceleration would have been the hardware MPEG2 (ie, DVD) accelerators, such as Sigma Designs REALMagic Hollywood+. This was a standalone PCI card that required a seperate video with support for hardware overlays in order to operate. I think you can still find these cards here and there.

[White_Pawn]

the geforce 256, (geforce 1) was the first GPU, so i'm thinking anything after that should have acceleration.

[Quailane]

Oblivionlord, all graphics cards offer video acceleration. The acceleration can be on the card itself or done by the processor.

Take a soundblaster live soundcard. It offers audio acceleration, but all the work of actually doing it goes to the processor. On the other hand, the Audigy was able to do some processing work itself. The Audigy 2 came along and did even more of the sound work itself, and gave even less work for the cpu to do. It is the same sort of thing with these video cards. Your ati rage may have Mpeg playback just like your 6800ultra, but the 6800ultra does a lot more of the work instead of the ati rage which sens pretty much all the work to the processor.

[PhysX]

That would be classified as proper hardware acceleration, right?

yes, when games such as the sims 2 ask for hardware acceleration they are asking for the card to have TnL, otehr wise CPU speed needs to be atleast 2ghz.

[Old Thrashbarg]

Oblivionlord, all graphics cards offer video acceleration.

No, not all of 'em, and definitely not all video formats. Only recently have video cards started to offer any hardware offloading of Mpeg4 and h.264 formats, and I'm not sure if all of 'em do even now. Years ago, many of the lower-end video cards offered no offloading of Mpeg2. The ATi Rage and such were the first of the kind that did, and even they only gave hardware assistance, not full decoding acceleration. It took stuff like the Creative DXR series or Hollywood Plus to completely offload from the main CPU. Mpeg1 goes a lot farther back, like Mpegger said with the old Orchid card.

Take a soundblaster live soundcard. It offers audio acceleration, but all the work of actually doing it goes to the processor.

Then that's marketing-speak, to make the feature list look nice. "Software acceleration" is another one of those popular meaningless terms. Real hardware acceleration, at least in terms of peripheral devices like sound and video, is supposed to take work off of the main cpu. That's the entire point of it.

the geforce 256, (geforce 1) was the first GPU

Huh?

[Mpegger]

Huh?

It seems that the concept of "video acceleration" is being confused with "3D acceleration" by many in this thread, Old Thrashbarg. :bang head

[benbaked]

I had a ISA bus Diamond Stealth Pro with 1 MB video memory that I bought in the mid 90s and it was classified as a 2D accelerator. It sped up the explosion animations in Raptor significantly. This was on a very old Packard Bell 386.

[Quailane]

No, not all of 'em, and definitely not all video formats. Only recently have video cards started to offer any hardware offloading of Mpeg4 and h.264 formats, and I'm not sure if all of 'em do even now. Years ago, many of the lower-end video cards offered no offloading of Mpeg2. The ATi Rage and such were the first of the kind that did, and even they only gave hardware assistance, not full decoding acceleration. It took stuff like the Creative DXR series or Hollywood Plus to completely offload from the main CPU. Mpeg1 goes a lot farther back, like Mpegger said with the old Orchid card.



Then that's marketing-speak, to make the feature list look nice. "Software acceleration" is another one of those popular meaningless terms. Real hardware acceleration, at least in terms of peripheral devices like sound and video, is supposed to take work off of the main cpu. That's the entire point of it.

:rolleyes: You're not listening to what I am saying.

[Hardin]

Overall I would say this thread is very confusing and no one understands what each other is trying to say. :confused::confused::confused:

[OBLIVIONLORD]

I understand everything so far. It's mainly intended for Video acceleration, not 3d or 2d "Grafic" acceleration.

I need to correct my above statement about Nvidia.. their first card with video acceleration wasn't Geforce256 but, NV3 Riva 128....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_128
"Released in late 1997 by NVIDIA, the RIVA 128, or "NV3", was one of the first consumer graphics chips to integrate 3D acceleration in addition to traditional 2D and video acceleration."

Quailane..
"Oblivionlord, all graphics cards offer video acceleration. The acceleration can be on the card itself or done by the processor."

The whole reason for this thread is to find out which cards did not have any video acceleration feature to help the cpu. If all the acceleration is done by the processor then the video card does not offer the feature such as Nvidia's NV1 and Ati's Mach series. I can name more but, you get the idea.

"Your ati rage may have Mpeg playback just like your 6800ultra, but the 6800ultra does a lot more of the work instead of the ati rage which sens pretty much all the work to the processor."

This is true but, the first ATI Rage was the first and only ATI card to do any amount of helping of the CPU accelerate the video even if it was a .0000000001%. Nothing prior to this card that ATI made helps the cpu with any Video format. Obviously the amount of acceleration has gotten better with both Nvidia and ATI but, both companies still had their first cards that offered it. Not all of their cards.

[Albuquerque]

It really really depends on how you want to define "video acceleration". If you truly mean even if it was a .0000000001%
... then it could be argued that very early ISA-bus video cards helped this. In fact, to be brutally honest, any dedicated framebuffer video card will accelerate video moreso than the CPU doing it alone. I mean, how often does your CPU send out the individual bits to the DAC for output on your screen, right?

I had an OAK 512kb 8-bit ISA card that would accelerate VESA page-flipping, which helped quite a bit in MPEG playback. My later S3 864p 2mb VLB card was capable of triple-buffered page-flipping (ooooh) and again continued to help with higher-resolutoin MPEG playback -- especially given the faster bus (40mhz, 32-bit interface of my VLB rig versus 8mhz, 8-bit interface of ISA)

This topic really IS misleading, as "acceleration" can be too widely defined, especially by what you've given (so far) as the definition.

[OBLIVIONLORD]

Considering that framebuffers work with grafic accelerators kind of tells you that a framebuffer feature on the gpu is not offloading cpu operations like a grafic accelerator. Since video acceleration is also doing just this then how can you relate frame buffering with any sort of acceleration since the cpu is the only thing processing the bits which defeats the whole purpose of acceleration of Grafics or Video?

[Albuquerque]

Considering that framebuffers work with grafic accelerators kind of tells you that a framebuffer feature on the gpu is not offloading cpu operations like a grafic accelerator.
Oh contraire... Original video cards required the CPU to issue the individual pixel draws, and were single-frame dumb-buffer output devices. Innovation led to the ability for the video card to do more and more of this work, and also allowed for multiple buffers onboard.

As video cards progressed, more and more things have been moved into the "GPU" as it were. My OAK card was a huge step away from the CGA cards of yore, as the CPU didn't have to define each pixel of a block fill, and simple "shapes" could be defined by coordinates versus a pixel-by-pixel computation (so long as you knew how to send those instructions to the chip, of course)

Later models (like my S3) could even build simple Windows GUI components, a precursor to what would become the Windows GDI. It also allowed for direct memory-to-video transfers in the form of BLITting without having the CPU manage every data component.

Again, this thread is too naive in it's definition of acceleration. You can argue all you like, but GPU's have been "accelerating" video since the early 90's. Of course, this denotes a point when they weren't...

[OBLIVIONLORD]

I can understand how you and others in this forum are finding the topic confusing since it just says "video acceleration". However amongst the HTPC community, we all recognize this terminology used today to signify the videocards ability to help decode video formats relieving stress off the cpu. Perhaps I should have mentioned in the topic "pertaining to video formats" this way it would be less confusing.

The videocards innovations to help the cpu as you mentioned above still does not specifically pertain to this. For example, the "Hardware Acceleration" feature in XP under troubleshooting allows you to disable some or all video acceleration aspects depending on how far you move the slider. It can range from disabling cursor, bitmaps, advanced drawings, directdraw and direct3D acceleration to eventually everything, but basic acceleration to eventually all acceleration.

[Albuquerque]

Well, and once again, even my 15-year old VLB S3-864p card would accelerate video (yes, I'm talking about video in the same sense you are). Case in point: my older ISA OAK card was quite slow on the same system.

Part of it was obviously bandwidth, to be sure. But that wasn't all, and it still isn't all. So, once again, integrated "video acceleration" in terms of motion video started well into the last decade. GDI acceleration started even before that.

Oh, and I'm quite aware of what the slider in XP does :) Here's another trivia tidbit: Vista doesn't use GDI acceleration at all; that functionality is now entirely emulated in software by the CPU.

[OBLIVIONLORD]

What specific video format does your 864 convert or decode? I'm only seeing the 868/928 as the first cards from S3 with the feature to convert the YUV to RGB.

Here's a good list. Won't find 864 in it.
http://www.mpeg2.de/doc/maillist/mp2lis.htm#DECV

http://www.byte.com/art/9502/sec11/art2.htm
'One of the first single-board solutions for graphics and video acceleration is VideoLogic's 928Movie . The card uses S3's 86C928 graphics accelerator with 32-bit memory interleaving. The primary purpose of the 928Movie is to accelerate motion-video playback of Indeo, Cinepak and Microsoft Video 1 digital-video files."

I'm not seeing anything with your old Oak card that suggests it accelerates any particular video format.

[Mpegger]

To quote a previous response, "Well, and once again," people miss the mark with what the OP is asking for: video acceleration. As in motion video. As in offloading the cpu partially or fully from having to decode a compressed motion video format.

[Trottel]

To quote a previous response, "Well, and once again," people miss the mark with what the OP is asking for: video acceleration. As in motion video. As in offloading the cpu partially or fully from having to decode a compressed motion video format.

Probably should say movie instead of video.

[Mpegger]

for TnL it was the 8500 for ati, and gf2 for nvidia.
Not true... i have a gf2 card and it wont cut hdtv....100% CPU and it still stutters.. I can set CPU to high priority and it gets better still not perfect...(2.4GHz p4) so that obviously menas CPU bnot GPU usage

Again, people just arent getting the topic. Just what does Transform and Lighting for 3D graphics acceleration, have to do with motion video acceleration? Unless I'm the one not understanding OBLIVIONLORD.... http://www.jal2s.com/uploader/files/1/headscratch.gif

[Albuquerque]

To quote a previous response, "Well, and once again," people miss the mark with what the OP is asking for: video acceleration.
Motion video acceleration can be obtained without decode functionality. That would be my point, and I've reiterated your point just to reinforce how badly it seems this question was worded.

The original question was video acceleration. We've covered that in 2D, 3D and GDI. The updated question was motion video acceleration, and we've covered that in terms of BLITting, page flipping and some other minor changes.

Would you like to completely rephrase again, and ask about hardware-assisted decoding of MPEG streams? Or WMV streams? Or just color conversion that applies to any generalized video stream? Or something even smaller?

Ask a general question, and you'll get a lot of general answers. Don't be angry if we can't all read your mind...

[OBLIVIONLORD]

"Would you like to completely rephrase again, and ask about hardware-assisted decoding of MPEG streams? Or WMV streams? Or just color conversion that applies to any generalized video stream? Or something even smaller?"

You say you understand the terminology of video acceleration yet you still consider it to be a generalized question. That's odd when the HTPC community understands right off the bat that it is relating to decoding or converting specific formats off the videocard.

You responded before with ...
"Well, and once again, even my 15-year old VLB S3-864p card would accelerate video (yes, I'm talking about video in the same sense you are)."

When this is not true at all since your card did not have any hardware feature to convert YUV to RGB like the 868 and 928 did since they were the first from S3. Therefore....

"So, once again, integrated "video acceleration" in terms of motion video started well into the last decade."

Shows me that you aren't quite following along since you are still relating your old hardware that has an amount of "hardware acceleration" but, not specificity "video acceleration".

[Albuquerque]

You say you understand the terminology of video acceleration yet you still consider it to be a generalized question. That's odd when the HTPC community understands right off the bat that it is relating to decoding or converting specific formats off the videocard.
No, it's not odd -- it's that the HTPC crowd focuses on motion video acceleration -- the rest of the world isn't the Niche HTPC crowd is it? This isn't an HTPC forum, is it?

Just because I say "ghosting" doesn't mean you know what I'm talking about. When I ask "why doesn't my machine ghost correctly", I don't expect you to immediately assume I'm talking about the imaging application Ghost -- or immediatley assume I'm talking about my LCD panel -- or immediately assume my machine is dead and floating above my head.

Context matters.

There are more methods of video acceleration than the narrow assumed definition from the HTPC crowd; you do recognize this fact, correct?

"Well, and once again, even my 15-year old VLB S3-864p card would accelerate video (yes, I'm talking about video in the same sense you are)."

When this is not true at all since your card did not have any hardware feature to convert YUV to RGB like the 868 and 928 did since they were the first from S3. Therefore....
Therefore, you continue to misunderstand the point. Let me help you, in big bold red quoted print:
Motion video acceleration can be obtained without decode functionality. That would be my point, and I've reiterated your point just to reinforce how badly it seems this question was worded.

Accelerating motion video comes in many parts. Perhaps you were not aware before, but you are now. And so, once again, integrated "video acceleration" in terms of motion video started well into the last decade.

[OBLIVIONLORD]

"There are more methods of video acceleration than the narrow assumed definition from the HTPC crowd; you do recognize this fact, correct?"

Modern video card reviews that review the performance of video acceleration will always mention it's purpose in a HTPC. Therefore why is there a need to get down to specifics other than how well it performs when decoding or converting? Only you have a problem with this.

Perhaps you need to recognize that this term used today doesn't incorporate all aspects of video acceleration.

[Albuquerque]

Modern video card reviews that review the performance of video acceleration will always mention it's purpose in a HTPC. Therefore why is there a need to get down to specifics other than how well it performs when decoding or converting? Only you have a problem with this.

Big print for extra effectivenes: You weren't asking about modern cards. You asked at what point "video acceleration" happened in history.

You asked this question in the General GPU category.

In terms of general GPU video acceleration, it happened decades ago.

You got your answer.

I'm done with you and this thread.

[OBLIVIONLORD]

Using todays terminology to describe something in the past is very valid however you don't want to look at it that way. I was asking about Video Acceleration history and considering todays terminology of this.. it would limit the selection down to just those that first incorporated hardware decoding and/or converting.