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hello all,

I have an ION system that is running xbmc on windows 7 64bit with 2gb ddr3 system ram. Some of the earlier posts on hardware configuration have recomended a gpu frame buffer of 512mb for playing smooth 1080p content.

Out of curiosity, I used Everest to check the frame buffer usage and to my surprise, in a half hour of typical usage (browsing titles, playing 1080p content) the usage never beyond 60 mb!

To test this i reset the buffer from 512mb to 128mb and as expected everything played as well as before. Can someone comment on this anomaly / myth? Are there potential situations/use cases were more frame buffer would be required?

I'm using the confluence skin and dxva2.
iirc it used to need 512mb allocated to it, however there were some changes where it would dynamically allocate system memory to vdpau when needed.

I always leave my gpu memory in the bios set to auto and have never had an issue.
it depends on the h264 profile. full level 5.1 with 16 1080p reference frames requires about 128mb just to store those, then you have textures and other decoding state. this easily sums up to > 256mb, which means 512 is the next level possible in most bioses.
thanks for the feedback.

I don't have any complete 1080p mkv movies with L5.1 +16 frames, but can download some samples (killa.sample.mkv + CHD-Transformers-1080p-Sample.mkv)

Are these samples <100mb sufficient to test, or do we need a large file e.g. >512mb to fill up the framebuffer? Can you recomend any videos for this test?

Thanks.
I have been unable to use deinterlacing methods for 1080i material when using less than 512mb, this seems to be coherent with reports on other media center fora like mythtv.
by my understanding, there isnt any deinterlacing done with hardware decoded x264 videos ... i dont think this is anything to do with the framebuffer