Radeon HD 2900 XT: where did the HD acceleration go?

AMD-ATI has already been hit a lot by the R600 GPU, which arrives with a significant slip in terms of performance on average, but it looks like the latest torture around Radeon isn’t over that far.

Scott Wasson of The Tech Report pointed out that in addition to an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor and a Radeon HD 2900 XT video card, as well as the included CyberLink PowerDVD, when playing an HD video, the CPU its load ranged from 40 to 50%.

As a result, Scott approached AMD-ATI with this issue and was confirmed that the R600 GPU did not include the UVD required for hardware acceleration of HD videos, i.e. the Unified Video Decoder. This is special, among other things, because the HD 2400 and HD 2600 Radeons did not miss the UVD, but the current peak HD 2900 XT did, so it did not surpass the members of the previous series in this respect, the X1000 Radeons.

The piquancy of the case is given by the fact that AMD-ATI advertises the HD 2900 XT as if UVD were also part of the GPU, when there is no mention of that. With benevolence, we can call it a simple inattention, with a negative attitude, even a conscious deception, that AMD-ATI refers to UVD as a technology found in all members of the HD 2000 series. Although we can talk about ATI Avivo HD support for the R600, UVD is missing, so when watching high-definition movies, a significant part of the computing tasks is transferred to the processor by the GPU, so it does not relieve it.

AMD-ATI defends that it did not say a word that UVD is also part of the R600 graphics core, but the manufacturer's generalization can rightly be called misinformation and, more importantly, the hardware acceleration of HD videos. solved for this GPU as well, only there is no driver or media player that can take advantage of this capability of the graphics processor yet.