To keep the world economy going, I purchased an extra graphics board, an ATI 3450. To be honest, it came very cheap (like €50 or so incl. VAT) so this purchase alone won’t take us out of the crisis. It seems like a nice board for video though with claimed hardware support for MPEG2 and H.264 decoding. The NVidia (!) MPEG2 decoder works fine and plays a DVD with 2 – 4% CPU utilization. That’s the lowest I’ve ever seen. I don’t think that the H/W acceleration kicks in for AVCHD using the trial version of the PowerDVD8 H.264 decoder even though the register bit for it is set. The CPU hovers at around 20% and it’s a four core Phenom processor. The corresponding number is 40 – 50% CPU utilization on a single core 3.2 GHz Intel. The resulting video is fine though, regardless of on which piece of silicon the decoding actually takes place.

The refresh rate – display rate synchronization mechanism (“genlock”) of GothPlayer works fine with the ATI board as expected but until now not verified.

Unfortunately the support for newer ATI boards by PowerStrip (the application I use to access the graphics board hardware registers) is almost as poor as for NVidia boards. But now there is at least this board that is still available on the market.