Seems unlikely that Windows 98 will ever manifest on this system. The Opteron 185 was released Mar 6, 2006. By this time in the computer evolution, people generally held onto their systems later than previous generations. In my mind, anything up to 2011 seems fitting. "low-end" doesn't sound all the exciting for benchmarking, troubleshooting, and curiosity. Passive sounds nice as I really dislike fan noise.

Is it the entire HD 5000 and 6000 series which has XP drivers? What Nvidia series was the last for XP support? W2k3 support would be nice, but not essential.

AMD has a release of driver version 14.4 for XP, so 7000 series cards are certainly supported, and the R9-290 might be as well. For nVidia, I believe the last supported cards are the GTX Titan and 700 series.

Gosh, I cannot believe the vast selection of graphic cards between the GF7 series and GTX 700. I have really fallen behind. Are graphic cards becoming mainstream as all purpose online video decoders now? Aside from gaming and CAD, is there any advantage in upgrading?

I have a S939 system that runs Windows 98 just fine.

For hardware accelerated VP9 youtube videos (1440p 30FPS and higher quality), you need a modern GPU.
However all DX10 class and later cards support some kind of video acceration.
First cards with HVEC/x265 are NV Pascal and Skylake iGPU

feipoa wrote:

Prefer not to have something with more than 512 MB of RAM. The AGP HD4350 is 512 MB and is eats into the system RAM. If I set the AGP aperature down to 32 MB, I can get 2.92 GB of system RAM. Purpose is mostly benchmarking, troubleshooting, curiosity....

Use memory hole/memory remap option.
VRAM doesn't "eat" more than 256MB of RAM.
You coudn't have Titan support in WinXP otherwise (Lol).

feipoa wrote:

Aside from gaming and CAD, is there any advantage in upgrading?

If you get a 4K monitor, you often need to upgrade - either to a Haswell cpu (4000 series) or a $100+ video card that supports it

Do any of these graphic cards work out of the box in XP with full online video decoding? While I really just need any GF7+ PCIe card at this point, as I have none, if there is one which decodes these videos in XP, that would be the one to go for. I’ve noticed that online videos are what makes the Opteron overheat. I’m still going to remove the IHS and re-paste it when the cooler arrives. The HD4350 certainly does not decode online videos out of the box in XP. I remember doing some tests years back in Win7, and it seemed that I needed to download the videos and play them back in VLC for it to decode, and it was fussy about which videos it would decode.

Any idea if any, and which, cards would decode using Ubuntu? When POS2009 stops receiving updates (in a another year?) I may switch to Ubuntu.

feipoa wrote:

What do you guys think are suitable PCIe cards for this system? I don't own any PCIe cards except for a crummy x300 in my garage system. What's a relatively advanced PCIe x16 card with XP drivers that would be suitable for an Opteron 185 / FX-60? Prefer not to have something with more than 512 MB of RAM. The AGP HD4350 is 512 MB and is eats into the system RAM. If I set the AGP aperature down to 32 MB, I can get 2.92 GB of system RAM. Purpose is mostly benchmarking, troubleshooting, curiosity....

It is not the Vram itself that "eats" memory, It is the framebuffer. And how much it "eats" depends on the memory address it uses. No idea if or how you can manipulate the address though. For over a decade I have been mostly using 64bit windows, so the issue never comes up for me.

feipoa wrote:

Do any of these graphic cards work out of the box in XP with full online video decoding? While I really just need any GF7+ PCIe card at this point, as I have none, if there is one which decodes these videos in XP, that would be the one to go for. I’ve noticed that online videos are what makes the Opteron overheat. I’m still going to remove the IHS and re-paste it when the cooler arrives. The HD4350 certainly does not decode online videos out of the box in XP. I remember doing some tests years back in Win7, and it seemed that I needed to download the videos and play them back in VLC for it to decode, and it was fussy about which videos it would decode.

There are a number of issues to consider here. HD 4000 video decoding is somewhat questionable. I have never been able to get it to work reliably with my HD4670s. That being said, to get it to work for online videos the browser must support hardware decoding which only works for a few years now and even than not always reliable. I guess when you tried it browsers didn't really support it yet. In my experience with AMD you need at least a 5000 series card to have a shot at reliable hardware decoding.

The next is codec support. Driver support for AMD stopped with some HD 7900 card IIRC and for nvidia with the GTX 960. the only cards that support H265 to some useful degree aare the GTX 950 and 960 otherwise you are limited to h264. There is no support for VP9 on any card with XP drivers. Also, I do not know to which extent the hardware decoders are supported in XP at all, I never got the HD 4000 decoder to work properly on XP and any later card I have ran either under windows 7 or 10.

feipoa wrote:

Any idea if any, and which, cards would decode using Ubuntu? When POS2009 stops receiving updates (in a another year?) I may switch to Ubuntu.

I don't use linux

feipoa wrote:

Do any of these graphic cards work out of the box in XP with full online video decoding? While I really just need any GF7+ PCIe card at this point, as I have none, if there is one which decodes these videos in XP, that would be the one to go for. I’ve noticed that online videos are what makes the Opteron overheat. I’m still going to remove the IHS and re-paste it when the cooler arrives. The HD4350 certainly does not decode online videos out of the box in XP. I remember doing some tests years back in Win7, and it seemed that I needed to download the videos and play them back in VLC for it to decode, and it was fussy about which videos it would decode.

Any idea if any, and which, cards would decode using Ubuntu? When POS2009 stops receiving updates (in a another year?) I may switch to Ubuntu.

I believe both Radeon HD 4xxx cards and GeForce 8xxx series cards do full H264 decoding in hardware.

Technically, AMD HD 2000-3000 (except HD 2900) do full H.264 as well, but aren't flexible enough for browser acceleration. They were great for DXVA however. AMD HD 4000 (and HD 3000 IGP) work with browsers/Flash but they don't support all H.264 levels (ie 1080p60) and the drivers were abandoned at Windows 8.0 so could be buggy with modern software.

However, YouTube seems to want everyone on VP9 ASAP.

BTW, the Intel Cherrytrail / Braswell mobile SOCs support 8bit HEVC like Skylake and those were released before Skylake. But I think you really want to have 10bit support for it to have a future. Apparently 10bit is more efficient encoding, and HDR uses it.

Is 10bit more efficient or just higher fidelity? I know it's very commonly not supported in hardware.

gdjacobs wrote:

Is 10bit more efficient or just higher fidelity? I know it's very commonly not supported in hardware.

It's hard to find info, but here we have 10-bit H.264 being more efficient even with 8-bit material.
http://x264.nl/x264/10bit_02-ateme-why_does_1 … e_bandwidth.pdf

So why does a AVC/H.264 10-bit encoder perform better than 8-bit?

When encoding with the 10-bit tool, the compression process is performed with at least 10-bit accuracy compared to only 8-bit otherwise. So there is less truncation errors, especially in the motion compensation stage, increasing the efficiency of compression tools. As a consequence, there is less need to quantize to achieve a given bit-rate. The net result is a better quality for the same bit-rate or conversely less bit-rate for the same quality: between 5% and 20% on typical sources.

The other day I was investigating Intel Atom HEVC support and came across some discussion of 10-bit encoding being more efficient in general.

I believe 10 bit is needed for HDR

swaaye wrote:

Technically, AMD HD 2000-3000 (except HD 2900) do full H.264 as well, but aren't flexible enough for browser acceleration. They were great for DXVA however. AMD HD 4000 (and HD 3000 IGP) work with browsers/Flash but they don't support all H.264 levels (ie 1080p60) and the drivers were abandoned at Windows 8.0 so could be buggy with modern software.

In my experience HD 3000 cards (at least the HD 3650, and I think the 3850 also) can accelerate decoding in a browser, but only Windows 7 upwards, XP uses DXVA while 7 (I'm not sure Vista) uses DXVA2, which is what modern browsers seems to use; in fact I upgraded my HTPC from XP to 7 for this exact reason, and the HD 3650 AGP I used (it was a somewhat bizarre machine 🤣) worked flawlessly. Of course, in this days of 60 fps VP9 and 10 bit video we're out of luck.

It seems that hardware video decoding in the web browser under XP is problematic and will only get more so.
I have different machines set up for hardware H.264 playback using an HD2600XT AGP, a GT240, and a GT430. The HD2600 is definitely limited to 30fps, not sure about the Geforces.
But I'm in the habit of downloading videos and playing them in MPC-BE to get hardware acceleration (CPU usage is near zero). I've never seen it work on the youtube web site, or even in VLC Player.

This all sounds pretty complicated for a seemingly simple objective: reducing CPU overhead. Sounds like XP is a no go for this. If I were to put Win10 on my lowly Opteron 185, I assume I'd really need GPU decoding to make it more usable. If using Win10, which graphic card would be most appropriate for this task?

I remember reading that GeForce 8000 era cards had some issue dealing with the PCIe specificaiton 1.0A implementation, which this motherboard has. Various VGA and/or motherboard BIOSes had some workaround for this. Does this issue still exist with graphic cards containing PCIe 2.0, 2.1, and 3.0 specification when used on 1.0a?

feipoa wrote:

This all sounds pretty complicated for a seemingly simple objective: reducing CPU overhead. Sounds like XP is a no go for this. If I were to put Win10 on my lowly Opteron 185, I assume I'd really need GPU decoding to make it more usable. If using Win10, which graphic card would be most appropriate for this task?

You should be careful when choosing a Windows 10 version for your Opteron system, 64-bit versions of Windows 8.1 and 10 require CMPXCHG16b, PrefetchW, and LAHF/SAHF instructions which are absent in AMD K8 CPUs, so you'll have to use the 32-bit version.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not, just making sure.

Not aware, but not a show stopper. I'm out 1 GB. With a 64-bit OS, even though the BIOS's RAM check only reads 2992 MB, I'd still get to use the full 4 GB in the OS?

agent_x007 wrote:

Use memory hole/memory remap option. VRAM doesn't "eat" more than 256MB of RAM.

Just checked, and don't see a "memory hole" or "memory remap" option anywhere.

Anyone tried the latest supported AMD and NVIDIA cards in XP to confirm online graphic card video decoding is nil?

Man oh man, it's a bit ridiculous how much trouble those discrete GPUs had with browser based video acceleration! Meanwhile, the GMA X4500HD in my little Optiplex USFF from around the same era has no problem H/W decoding 1080p/60 H.264 in Chrome. And when VP9 is being streamed, the C2D E8600 is strong enough to handle 1080p/60 or 1440p/30 in software.

Now I'll quit bragging about my ancient integrated graphics and contribute to this tread. I have a dual-booting Opteron 185 myself! It has a GTX 560 in it, and I can confirm that hardware video acceleration does not work in Firefox under XP. But it does work just fine under Win7 x64. I'd imagine that the latest supported cards in XP would be no different.