I run windows XP on a pentium 2 (266 I think) laptop and it can play youtube videos at 240p with a really crummy video adapter although the whole system becomes sluggish while doing it.
I think with a pentium 3 it could be usable.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I'm not sure which ATI card was the first to support full Flash acceleration, but I do know that NVIDIA cards as early as G84 (GeForce 8600) and G92 (2nd gen 8800 GTS) support hardware decoding and rendering of Flash video.

The HD 3000 IGPs officially support it. They have some bit of newness to their UVD hardware, I believe. For cards, you need HD 4000 or newer.

But as I said in another post if you install Catalyst 9.11, all HD 3000 cards will do Flash acceleration, though it is a bit touchy and drops back to software decode occasionally. This was AFAIK the first driver with Flash acceleration and after 9.11 they abandoned HD 2000/3000. I'm not sure they ever meant to support them. I have a feeling there is a hardware reason behind it, but it is strange that it does mostly work with 9.11. I used to own a subnotebook that was unable to handle 720p without hardware assist and its HD 3410 of course doesn't officially support it. Spent a lot of time researching.

Firtasik wrote:

I have a laptop with Athlon 64 X2, Radeon HD 3200 and Vista. Flash GPU acceleration works fine. 😀

swaaye wrote:

The HD 3000 IGPs officially support it. They have some bit of newness to their UVD hardware, I believe. For cards, you need HD 4000 or newer.

Then that should explain why i wasn't getting GPU acceleration at 1080p with my ATI HD3850 AGP.
Well i don't know if this is a sollution that pleases you but you could always try the Greasemonkey addon and VLCTube Greasemonkey script. It opens Youtube videos on the vlc player and it seems to work quite well on much older video cards and cpus at 720p (not sure about 1080p). I've never really tried it but it seems that people who did were pretty satisfied with the results.

These are promising findings. Does anybody know if an ATI 4000+ card will work with with Flash acceleration on a Tualatin?

feipoa, If you have not seen this already, here is a Flash GPU acceleration guide I came across earlier when I was playing with my system.
http://archive.benchmarkreviews.com/index.php … d=419&Itemid=38
The ATI graphics card mentioned is that of HD4000 series with DXVA support for Flash GPU acceleration. Also I guess if an Intel Atom system with 2GB RAM under Win7 can play Youtube flash HD videos with DXVA and non-DXVA(with SSD), your dual Tualatin system should have a bright chance in doing so with a DXVA supported ATI 4000 GPU.
I'm however slightly confused with your question, will ATI 4000 card work with Flash acceleration 'on a Tualatin'

Standard Def Steve wrote:

If you haven't already, you may want to try watching YouTube with Firefox or IE in full screen mode. It may boost performance to the point of being watchable.

I already tried those browsers and finally settled with Opera 12.13. Firefox & IE might have provided you watchable full-screen experience in your supercool Tualatin rig, but not for me (even in Opera) as I think there were 2 factors working against me:
a) My internet connection is through a USB data card probably resulting in PCI bus contention (Northbridge-Southbridge link) with my PCI graphics card.
b) Your processor should almost have twice the performance of mine, more or less. Granted,it should not matter in case of GPU acceleration which should off-load CPU, but still some CPU horsepower will definitely be required for flash.
Anyway I will give it a try as I was concentrating only on getting better gaming performance.

It may come in handy: ViewTube

swaaye wrote:

The HD 3000 IGPs officially support it. They have some bit of newness to their UVD hardware, I believe. For cards, you need HD 4000 or newer.

But as I said in another post if you install Catalyst 9.11, all HD 3000 cards will do Flash acceleration, though it is a bit touchy and drops back to software decode occasionally. This was AFAIK the first driver with Flash acceleration and after 9.11 they abandoned HD 2000/3000. I'm not sure they ever meant to support them. I have a feeling there is a hardware reason behind it, but it is strange that it does mostly work with 9.11. I used to own a subnotebook that was unable to handle 720p without hardware assist and its HD 3410 of course doesn't officially support it. Spent a lot of time researching.

Good to know. 😀
So the HD 2000 cards were capable of Flash decode with 9.11 as well?

gandhig wrote:

I already tried those browsers and finally settled with Opera 12.13. Firefox & IE might have provided you watchable full-screen […]
Show full quote

I already tried those browsers and finally settled with Opera 12.13. Firefox & IE might have provided you watchable full-screen experience in your supercool Tualatin rig, but not for me (even in Opera) as I think there were 2 factors working against me:
a) My internet connection is through a USB data card probably resulting in PCI bus contention (Northbridge-Southbridge link) with my PCI graphics card.
b) Your processor should almost have twice the performance of mine, more or less. Granted,it should not matter in case of GPU acceleration which should off-load CPU, but still some CPU horsepower will definitely be required for flash.
Anyway I will give it a try as I was concentrating only on getting better gaming performance.

I wasn't talking about my "supercool" Tualatin rig. 😀 I did those browser/Flash acceleration tests on a modern system.

The 9800 Pro in the Tualatin does not support hardware decoding, but it does support hardware rendering of Flash video with Catalyst 7.3 (at least, it did when I tested it a year ago). Back then it was powerful enough to handle 480p at 30fps and 720p at 15-17fps. I have a thread about it.

That's probably changed by now. New releases of Flash never, ever improve performance.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

The 9800 Pro in the Tualatin does not support hardware decoding, but it does support hardware rendering of Flash video with Catalyst 7.3 (at least, it did when I tested it a year ago). Back then it was powerful enough to handle 480p at 30fps and 720p at 15-17fps. I have a thread about it.

That's probably changed by now. New releases of Flash never, ever improve performance.

With an X1950 Pro and the latest Catalyst 10.2 Legacy (=9.3 with error fixes AFAIK) on XP Youtube reported software decoding+rendering. AVIVO can offload at least part of the decoding process so it might be a Flash regression. It's not DirectX related since a D3D10 card on same the system was capable of hardware acceleration.

I think the requirement for Flash "hardware rendering" is D3D9 support. It only engages in full-screen too, AFAIK.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Good to know. 😀
So the HD 2000 cards were capable of Flash decode with 9.11 as well?

That I don't know. I have never used a HD 2000 series card... 😀

To what extent does the ATI HD 4000 series card accelerate Flashed-based content? Some people mentioned that certain cards only accelerate if you are watching full screen videos. What about scrolling Flash content, like advertising, or other Flash-based junk that clutters up the browser window? This is what really bogs down websites on a Tualatin. It seems like some sites I thought did not have Flash content did. You can tell by right clicking on the page - if "About Adobe Flash Player" comes up, it uses Flash. Will these graphic cards accelerate this type of Flash content?

Is there a latest Flash version that anyone recommends for a Tualatin, whereby the next incremental Flash update slowed the system down significantly?

I suggest using adblock or flashblock or something to kill the flash ads. Only open the filter for something you want to see like youtube.

It makes browsing a lot faster even on my main rig

You can also block many ads and malicous sites with a hosts file. I have one which contains ~25500 addresses. It's awesome. 😎

Flash has video and 3D acceleration but I'm not sure the 2D graphics are accelerated...

Adblock will bog down an old CPU so I suggest Flashblock. That's how I used to set up my old EEEPC and it only had a 900 MHz Celeron M.

Not sure what kind of impact a huge HOSTS file has...

feipoa wrote:

To what extent does the ATI HD 4000 series card accelerate Flashed-based content? Some people mentioned that certain cards only accelerate if you are watching full screen videos. What about scrolling Flash content, like advertising, or other Flash-based junk that clutters up the browser window? This is what really bogs down websites on a Tualatin. It seems like some sites I thought did not have Flash content did. You can tell by right clicking on the page - if "About Adobe Flash Player" comes up, it uses Flash. Will these graphic cards accelerate this type of Flash content?

Is there a latest Flash version that anyone recommends for a Tualatin, whereby the next incremental Flash update slowed the system down significantly?

For general use such as surfing flash performance isn't going to be that big but videos yes. If you are determined to watch something and things are just too choppy then download only to play with vlc.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addo … downloadhelper/

Be careful with Catalyst verions past 10.4 or so, when ATI removed legacy OpenGL support.

Also, regarding HD2xxx series and hardware decoding, I remember there was a debacle back in the day when it was discovered that the flagship 2xxx cards (2900 Pro and XT) lacked some sort of decoding that was present on the 2400 series and the 2600 series... I've still got a working 2900XT around. It's a monster of a card and its PCIe, and it's easily supplanted by much more efficient newer cards with chips manufactured thatr posses more modern engineering qualities (For example, the card has a 512-bit memory bus and consumes almost 200 watts IIRC, but is easily outperformed by 5xxx/6xxx/7xxx cards with 128-bit memory busses and much lower TDPs).

swaaye wrote:

Flash has video and 3D acceleration but I'm not sure the 2D graphics are accelerated...

Does online photo sharing software count as Flash video acceleration? People usually mix photos in with videos.

mockingbird wrote:

flagship 2xxx cards (2900 Pro and XT) lacked some sort of decoding that was present on the 2400 series and the 2600 series...

R600 has the Avivo video hardware of the R500 generation instead of the Avivo HD / UVD engine that the later HD 2xxx cards have. Without UVD it has only partial processing of VC-1 and H.264. CPU utilization is reduced a bit but not like with UVD's full processing.

GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS is similar in this way with the 7000 series' Purevideo VP1 instead of the VP2 in the later chips.

feipoa wrote:

Does online photo sharing software count as Flash video acceleration? People usually mix photos in with videos.

If you mean something like a photo slideshow presented in a H.264-compressed Flash video, then yes that would be accelerated.

H.264 - Is that what Picasa and Flickr use? Those type of photo sharing sites are what I am referring to, but not necessarily in fullscreen, slideshow format.

I have a dual 1.4 Tualatin overclocked to 1.6 and 2GB of SDRAM a 4670 agp. Also a raid 0 in the system with modern HD's.

Windows 7 Ultimate is butter smooth. Aero and everything. I have flash acceleration from the video card and can play 720p HD just fine and doing lite multitasking behind it. 1080p still drops frames.

I also have a dual Pentium 2 450 overclocked to 570 and 768 MB of ram. That has an 9800 Pro and raid 0 with 76 GB raptors.

Windows 7 Pro works well on this. Must keep multitasking down. Still can play YouTube just 480p takes everything it has to play. The Ram does limit it but really not bad.

I find Windows 7 to work better on older hardware than XP in every case if you have the drivers for the system (that does include Microsoft drivers.)

For a smooth usable system the key is more than one core , enough memory and the fasted storage medium you can get.

minigig, any issue with playback from Picasa or Flickr videos in non-full screen mode?