Filed under: iTS, Multimedia, Rumors, Macbook Pro, MacBook
New MacBooks adding NVIDIA hardware H.264 decoding?
Something interesting has popped up with the new NVIDIA graphics hardware in the unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros: hardware H.264 decoding. MacRumors is reporting that owners of the new MacBooks are seeing considerably less CPU usage when playing high definition H.264 content on the new machines versus the previous generation. One user reported his new MacBook running at only 28% CPU utilization while playing a 1080p video versus 100% for his older MacBook Pro running at the same clock speed.It's been known for some time that NVIDIA has been including hardware decoding in their chips, but this appears to be the first time that Apple has actually implemented support for it in OS X. Some are speculating that this signals big things for the future of QuickTime X in Apple's forthcoming Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) and future 1080p video content in the iTunes Store and may be connected to Steve Jobs' recent dismissal of Blu-ray. Of course, none of this has been confirmed by Apple, but it does appear to be the best explanation for the performance increase we're seeing in the new machines.
[via I, Cringley]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
EMoShunz said 3:48PM on 10-21-2008
i'd like to add my own little rumor to this.
apple is upgrading, not discontinuing, the mini's to support this as well
apple is going to offer a software package to enable a mini-dvr (media center) out of the box.
apple will start selling 1080p
no backup, no sources, just more of a guy making a wish list...isn't that how one starts a rumor :P
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Luigi193 said 3:52PM on 10-21-2008
Welcome to last week!!
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Balls said 4:10PM on 10-21-2008
So what about previous MBP and MP with dedicate GPU's? Does OSX already support offloading H264 to the gpus?
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iomatic said 4:47PM on 10-22-2008
Since the MacBook Air is theoretically fairly identical to the MacBook, would those new ones have the capability?
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James Churchman said 6:56PM on 10-21-2008
slightly more an "engadged" type question, but i downloaded some of the "raw" files from the net from the new Canon 5D (all in H.264, 1080P at between around 40 ish + MB/sec and they were unplayable on the mac i tried (imac 24 inch 2.1 ghz with upped gfx card and 2gbs of ram)) it dropped more than half the frames.
The only solution to edit these files i found was to convert them to apple intimidate codec, and then they played fine (and coudl be edited in both FCP and iMovie 08) but it did more than double the file sizes, took twice the play back time to do and i imagine reduced the quality a bit. One review even said they though a mac pro quad core (that i am about to purchase) would fail to play back properly
does anybody know if the any of the gfx cards from nvidia in mac pro's can support h.264 playback (and if its every something we may see in an update) (and also, as a long shot has anybody tried playing back canon 5D footage on a mac pro, did it go smothley? eg the ones from here http://www.dpreview.com/previews/canoneos5dmarkII/page15.asp )
many thanks
James
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Horst said 7:38PM on 10-21-2008
Hey folks, Nvidia has a technology called CUDA that it's implemented in good large portion of it's video cards and all of the Intel based Mac's using NVIDIA chips can handle the technology which Apple seems to be implementing NOW. Take a look at http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_develop.html
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Jesse said 8:25PM on 10-21-2008
Apple has a competing API called OpenCL. It's unlikely they are using CUDA. Furthermore, you don't need CUDA to do GPU accelerated decoding of H.264. CUDA != accelerated decoding. They are separate.
Joyntkid said 10:23PM on 10-21-2008
CUDA is more of an advanced method to allow for faster h264 decoding for encoding, such as the new Quadro CX has. It has been implemented in a few encoding programs already.
All of the 8 series nvidia cards(not sure about 9) do hardware accelerated decoding, but only using certain codecs (certain h264 codecs, such as the Cyberlink h264 that comes with PowerDVD).
I can watch 1080p on my MBP (2.4Ghz, mid 2007) in windows with low CPU usage because of that. It would more likely be a software update needed, not just a hardware.
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dennitzio said 2:35PM on 10-22-2008
I have an iMac with a Radion 2600 HD. According to this page (http://hothardware.com/Articles/ATI_Radeon_HD_2600_and_2400_Performance/) this card has h.264 decoding also. Is my iMac using it or not? And if not, does this mean Apple has enabled that in their OS?
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