[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for this
link. ]
“We know that NVIDIA’s Video Decode and Presentation
API for Unix (VDPAU) works very well for exposing PureVideo
capabilities on Linux. We have benchmarked VDPAU and found it to
perform very well in that under Linux it’s possible to play HD
videos with a $20 CPU and $30 GPU thanks to this video acceleration
method. VDPAU is the best video acceleration / decoding API on
Linux and is widely adopted by various multimedia applications,
which is all in contrast to AMD’s XvBA and their troubled
implementation. But how does VDPAU work on mobile devices? With the
ASUS Eee PC 1201N that is built on NVIDIA’s ION platform we ran a
new set of VDPAU video playback tests.“With this 12.1″ netbook that has an Intel Atom N330 dual-core
1.60GHz processor, NVIDIA MCP79 motherboard, 2GB of DDR2 memory,
250GB Hitachi HTS54502 SATA 2.0 HDD, and NVIDIA ION graphics with
512MB of video memory we used the Phoronix Test Suite with its
video-cpu-usage test profile that charts the CPU usage as a 1080p
H.264 video file is played back three times. When running this test
profile we also enabled the Phoronix Test Suite’s system monitoring
module to record some other metrics. We compared the mobile VDPAU
performance for this NVIDIA ION netbook when using GL2, X-Video,
and VDPAU acceleration methods. Ubuntu 9.10 (x86_64) was running on
this system with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel and the NVIDIA 190.53
proprietary display driver.”