Dual 1080P possible?

[squiffy]

A acquitance thinks you can't get dual view, 1920x1080. He's got 7800 series card. I can't see why not. So does 1080P work in clone and stretch mode?

I think he wants two HD videos (perhaps BR/HD-DVD) playing at the same time, perhaps identical movies at the same time or different movies. What kind of specced machine is needed to do this? I only have access to one 1080p at a time.

 

[Boogle]

You can run dual 1080p screens. There's nothing special about 1080p, its just a resolution. Well the p signifies the movie is progressive, but thats beside the point in this case.

Any dual head card can display dual 1920x1080 screens. Don't expect to run two HD movies at the same time though, just decoding a single movie is intensive enough. You can run dual movies though given the right software though. The software has to use Direct3D rather than overlay since the overlay is only available on one screen at a time.

 

[Rroff]

2x 1080p movies playing at the same time is perfectly possible... but you will need a powerful CPU probably minimum of a E6300/X2 4800+ and faster better... (My 3gig P4C Northwood) just about manages it with one source...

 

[Boogle]

2x 1080p movies playing at the same time is perfectly possible... but you will need a powerful CPU probably minimum of a E6300/X2 4800+ and faster better... (My 3gig P4C Northwood) just about manages it with one source...

E6300 is maxed out with a single 1080p source:
"but we will have to investigate this further when we have hardware. It almost goes without saying that we fully expect even the lowliest of Core 2 Duo processors to be able to handle 1080p content (with any encoding), though they will still likely be very close to 100% CPU usage" source: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2798

The GPU will only be able to hardware accelerate a single source, and you'll still be using 20-30% CPU. Add in a second source...

 

[ugly ferret]

My 2.9ghz dual core opteron could run two 1080p clips flawlessly at the same time. So there you go!

 

[Rroff]

E6300 is maxed out with a single 1080p source:

Yeah but... it was probably only using one of those cores... which on an E6300 using just one core is only slightly faster than a 3gig P4... so if you had 2 players going windows thread scheduler should automatically make use of both cores to give both players adequate CPU time.

On my P4 3gig without overlay mode the CPU is completely hammered to playback 1080p (smoothly without dropped frames)... with overlay mode its using about 40% CPU...

On my 3gig conroe its using 2% to playback using the NV12 hardware acceleration on my 7950GX2, 15% using an overlay and 38% (of one core) without any overlay or acceleration.

So if you have one running overlay or accelerated and the other using plain old rendering on the CPU it should just about work on an E6300.

 

[james.miller]

E6300 is maxed out with a single 1080p source:
"but we will have to investigate this further when we have hardware. It almost goes without saying that we fully expect even the lowliest of Core 2 Duo processors to be able to handle 1080p content (with any encoding), though they will still likely be very close to 100% CPU usage" source: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2798

The GPU will only be able to hardware accelerate a single source, and you'll still be using 20-30% CPU. Add in a second source...

thats suprising. playing hd-dvd's on my e6600 @ 3.2ghz uses around 20%. i could quite conceivable play 3 movies at once

 

[Boogle]

thats suprising. playing hd-dvd's on my e6600 @ 3.2ghz uses around 20%. i could quite conceivable play 3 movies at once

You have an 8800GTX

To the people with these low CPU usage figures - are you playing both a 1080p source (as opposed to 720p), as well as decoding H.264, as opposed to the less aggressive encoding methods? H.264 is the one that starts to soak up the CPU power.

If the movies you were decoding were MPEG2 then the CPU usage won't be much higher than with a DVD.

 

[james.miller]

You have an 8800GTX

yep. with hardware acceleration off my cpu usages is around 30-35%. thats playing a hd-dvd, vc1 style.

 

[Rroff]

With my E6600 @ 3.0gig I'm seeing about 38% - so your figures pretty much match mine given the slightly higher clock speed...