Does DX make much difference to movies?

[ExoMale]

My movies are all BD H264 files in 720p and some 1080p and I have never watched them on pretty much lower than dx11 dedicated cards or lower than Intel HD4000 whatever Dx that has.


Regardless of my optiplex having a socket 775 P4 HT which can sort of run them, I have a hugely weak 6200le with 64mb vram in there that I put it out of a rebuild to see what it was and while it can play the files, depending on the actual film it can seem in slow mo and surprisingly it plays 1080p smoother than hd4000(which stutters and stops) other than slow mo and sound out of sync , so I really need to upgrade, however I am just curious whether directX plays any part or simply vram??? I could have more chances of finding a dx9 card with 128-1gb that would run in the dell than whatever dx11 would work as the r7 240 certainly ruled out and have no clue what card will stick within dells 25-35w slot limit.



I tried googling the answer, but all I get is pointless comparisons or links to the best cards of whatever year.

 

[h4rm0ny]

My movies are all BD H264 files in 720p and some 1080p and I have never watched them on pretty much lower than dx11 dedicated cards or lower than Intel HD4000 whatever Dx that has.


Regardless of my optiplex having a socket 775 P4 HT which can sort of run them, I have a hugely weak 6200le with 64mb vram in there that I put it out of a rebuild to see what it was and while it can play the files, depending on the actual film it can seem in slow mo and surprisingly it plays 1080p smoother than hd4000(which stutters and stops) other than slow mo and sound out of sync , so I really need to upgrade, however I am just curious whether directX plays any part or simply vram??? I could have more chances of finding a dx9 card with 128-1gb that would run in the dell than whatever dx11 would work as the r7 240 certainly ruled out and have no clue what card will stick within dells 25-35w slot limit.



I tried googling the answer, but all I get is pointless comparisons or links to the best cards of whatever year.

If you're asking about DX version, then no. That's pretty much all about games. However, that's not the same as saying a newer card wont make any difference. Very old cards lack hardware decoding for h264. With Nvidia, I think it came in with the 6800GT. With the AMD cards, I think anything from the X1800 had hardware decode. So all but extremely old cards should have this. However, I think there was an improved version in the Radeon HD 2000 series (called UVD) and later which will give you better quality. I recall buying my... HD2600 (maybe?) for this reason.

You don't need more than a pittance of VRAM for a card to play video files. They can pretty much put it on the screen as fast as the disk or network connection can feed it the data so buffering is mostly a non-issue.

Note that h265 is a thing these days and HDR (high dynamic range) is coming. Pascal and Polaris cards will support these things, older wont for HDR and probably wont for h265. If you're a movie fanatic, these are things you'll want, but it sounds like you aren't.

Basically what you want to be Googling for is hardware decode of h264. If the graphics card has this, it ought to be fine for playing movies encoded with this at 720 and (unless it's very old) at 1080. A card without this probably isn't going to be much help as the CPU will probably end up doing nearly all the work.

 

[harney]

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/26-home-theater-computers/1357375-advanced-mpc-hc-setup-guide.html

 

[joeyjojo]

DXVA is probably the tech you're thinking of. Provides hardware decoding of video in Windows.

Not sure what the requirements are though. It won't be VRAM, but GPU performance will play some part. Video bitrates go up and down and very complex scenes are more taxing than less. For example I have a bluray rip of Planet Earth and one of the earliest shots is of thousands of birds and that can bring even gaming GPUs to their knees.

 

[ExoMale]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I am a movie fanatic, but not like I used to, well I say 'used to be' I had over 300/400gb of movies many moons ago and it have over 200gb now from starting my collection again, but I have never used old tech like dx9/dx10 dedicated card era to watch them and really only this new collection is in the bluray format, but then even before I figured 1gb and hd support was what you really needed for the basics, as its on my Monitor there isn't any fancy 120hz to 4K needed to be powered.


Just while dx10 cards can be had cheaper than dx9 in some cases I figured if I could get a decent dx9 it would do what I want, I'm use to using the old types on old games and as far as dx11 cards go, I don't know what cards will actually run in my dell as I was expecting the r7 240 to, but guess than card requires more than 25/35 watts.



But I don't understand my 6200le 64mb, I can't run 1080 on hd4000 graphics or whatever 6 series graphics included in the APU chips along the lines of the e350 and A4 range, but I run it on a combination of crappy graphic chips just not with sound in sync???? I haven't devactovated onboard, so I think total video memory at use is like 500mb or something, this was before maxing ram at 4gb, so don't know what the share be now.

 

[Rannoch]

What software are you using to play the movies?

 

[Toss3]

If you are a film fanatic, I would advice you to go for something that supports HEVC/H.265 hardware decoding, as most upcoming 4K releases will be using this codec, and this is something older CPUs won't be able to handle. Also if you want the best quality use MPC-BE, with the madVR video renderer. For the best settings look here.