[mythtv-users] GeForce 8400 still recommended for VDPAU?

Jim Stichnoth stichnot at gmail.com
Sun May 17 18:34:18 UTC 2009


On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 8:06 AM, Allen Edwards
<allen.p.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you really gain anything getting a high power usage and expensive video
> card over just getting a powerful CPU and letting the CPU do the decoding?
>  This 9500GT seems to have coper heat pipe cooling so it must be a power
> hog. Just asking...
> Allen

A general purpose CPU may do extra things that a GPU doesn't.  E.g.,
complex instruction decoding, cache coherency, branch prediction, deep
pipelines for fast sequential execution, which consume extra power.  A
GPU might have specialized hardware like shaders or wide vector units
that take a lot more instructions (and power) to duplicate on a CPU.
There may be other reasons that would favor a particular CPU over a
particular GPU, but the other way around is certainly feasible.

Jim


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list