NV180 Linux drive video decoding acceleration test

Article Title: video decoding acceleration for Linux NV180. Linux is a technology channel of the IT lab in China. Includes basic categories such as desktop applications, Linux system management, kernel research, embedded systems, and open source.

NVIDIA launched the Windows 180 graphics card driver a month ago, but the Linux version has been delayed. Compared with the Windows version that focuses on SLI and other game performance, the Linux 180 driver will focus more on work efficiency, increase CUDA 2.1 Support, and optimize workstation performance, improve X Render and so on. However, we are most interested in adding a new vdpau api, which is equivalent to PureVideo on Linux.

Currently, X-Video output modules on Linux are Xv and XvMC. XvMC can accelerate the graphics card hardware in a certain sense, but only supports the MPEG-2 format. NVIDIA drivers have previously supported X-Video, but GeForce 8 XvMC supports stopping the update. In terms of competitors, AMD is developing XvBA API to bring UVD2 acceleration to Linux.

NVIDIA's Countermeasure VDPAU came into being. VDPAU is short for Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (Video decoding and rendering API for Unix systems), supports hardware decoding MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H. 264 and VC-1 format, also support some special effects of decoding video, such as anti-crossover, noise reduction. The hardware supports GeForce 8 and later graphics cards, and the system supports Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

The Phoronix website recently tested the first Linux driver that supports VDPAU. Use the Ubuntu 8.10, Linux 2.6.27 core, X Server 1.5.2, NVIDIA 180.08 driver. The Hardware includes Core 2 Duo E8400 (downgrading to 1.8GHz for better performance of CPU usage), Asus P5E64 Professional motherboard, 2 GB DDR3 memory, GeForce 9800GTX 512MB graphics card. To implement hardware decoding, install MPlayer, libavcodec, libavutil, and ffmpeg patches provided by NVIDIA, and add "-vo vdpau-vc ffh1_vdpau" to MPlayer.

The video is Grey. ts, H.264 encoded on the MPlayer official website. The following is a metric chart showing the CPU usage of different output modules:

GL2 output

X-Video output

Use VDPAU

 

As you can see, the hardware acceleration effect is quite obvious. The video card takes over almost all video decoding operations, and the CPU usage is always below 10%.