Is the radeon HD 4350 any good for a SageTV client?

[brainbone]

Looking to get one of my SageTV client PCs working better for HD on the cheap.

The system is currently an AM2 X2 4000+ w/ a HD 3450 GPU. With registry tweaks, it works OK with SD, 720P and 1080P material, but 1080i looks terrible, apparently not being able to properly detect and pulldown telecined material.

Is the HD 4350 any better with 1080i?

[Fuzzy]

This is a function of the codecs used, not the graphics card. Keeping everything the same (codecs) you will see the exact same thing with the 4350.. so basically, save you money and figure out why your codecs aren't deinterlacing..

[Chriscic]

I'm not an expert here, but I would think there are also driver differences that might make the 4350 work better. Guess you need to find someone that has one.

[gplasky]

You have the 3450 capable of 40 processing streams where the 4350 can do 80 processing streams. Also The ATI Radeon™ HD 4350 delivers 4.8 GigaFLOPS per Watt, compared with the ATI Radeon HD 3450 which delivers 2.4 GigaFLOPS per Watt. SO from a performance aspect the 4350 is better. But if 1080i looks bad then it may have more to do with the version of drivers being used and/or the settings being used.

Gerry

[brainbone]

My understanding is that the 3450 doesn't have the processing power required to properly deinterlace 1080i. Since the 4350 appears to be roughly twice as powerful, I would hope it does have enough -- though I would have thought the 3450 should have had enough as well -- so much of it comes down to the drivers.

As for the codec, codecs that use hardware acceleration depend on the hardware/drivers to provide the necessary decoding/deinterlacing, or end up falling back to software... so it is a function of the hardware and drivers.

Does anyone have personal experience with the 4350? How it is working for you with 1080i?

[brainbone]

Reading review after review showed inconsistent and varying opinions on the 4350's suitability for 1080i content, but this holds true for just about all AMD graphics cards -- so I ordered a 4350, I'll let you all know if it's any good when I get it. Worst case, I'm out $25.

[Fuzzy]

I can say I have a 3650 and have no deinterlacing problems.. this is why i suspect it is a software issue. Basic Bob or Weave deinterlacing takes relitevely NO processing power, and should be all that is required to get proper playback of 1080i video.

[gplasky]

Actually I have a 3300 integrated on my 790GX motherboard and don't have an issue with 1080i. I use PowerDVD v8 set for hardware acceleration with no updates for the decoder for both mpeg2 (clearQAM recordings) and h.264 (HD-PVR recordings).

Gerry

[brainbone]

I'm very sensitive to video quality. 1080i content deinterlaced with bob looks very bad to me. The majority of 1080i content is telecined, and the should be converted to its original 24fps progressive format before being displayed. Sand that, vector adaptive, or practically anything else, would be preferable to BOB or field blending.

[brainbone]

So, I have my 4350.

I can get MPEG2 1080i looking good in graphstudio (a graphedit clone) using just about any decoder that uses hardware deinterlacing (MPV, PDVD, ATI), but in SageTV it looks terrible. Worse than it did with my 3450 for that matter.

In SageTV, if I set the decoder to PowerDVD 7 1080i looks like the odd field, then even field, are being thrown out -- switching between them every 1-3 seconds. If the decoder is set to SageTV Mpeg2 decoder, 1080i looks like its been decoded with a blended field deinterlacer (motion leaves trails, video is softened) .

Again, in graphstudio I can get the same video file working great by setting the decoder to use DXVA and deinterlace to auto.

I'm using EVR (Vista) in both graphstudio and SageTV Client (6.5.20).

Any ideas?

[Taddeusz]

Download the dsfmgr and go into the filter properties from there and ensure that DXVA acceleration is enabled. I believe the older versions of PDVD disabled DXVA by default.

[brainbone]

dfsmgr shows that DXVA is enabled, so unfortunately, that's not it.

[brainbone]

Still not getting my HD4350 working well.

Those with a HD4350, how do you have it configured?