choosing between VDPAU capable GPU's
#1
After reading a lot about VDPAU capable gpu's and integrated gpu's. I'm still not certain what the pro and cons are of each of the following four choices. Who can fill in the blancs?

Onboard gpu's
= 8300 igp (integrated graphic processor)=
+ Cheap (motherboard prices start at 50 euro)
- uses the G98 chip, which has a problem showing normally unused resolutions
- uses slightly more power than the 9400 igp
- igp is not to powerfull, only possible to play very light games

= 9400 igp =
- expensive (Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H = 123 euro)
+ uses slightly less power than the 8300
+ populair chipset (well tested)
+ more powerfull than the 8300 (possible to play light to medium games)

PCI-e cards
Geforce 8400 GS 512mb passive
+ cheap (30 euro)
+ low power usages
- same bug as 8300 igpu
- low power usage, but uses more than above igpu's

Geforce 9400Gt 512mb passive
+ cheap (40 euro)
+ capable of doing 2* vdpau de-interlacing
- uses more power than the 8400

Geforce 9500gt 512mb passive
+ cheap (43 euro)
+ capable of doing 2* vdpau de-interlacing
- uses more energy than the 8400 but not significanly more than the 9400 GT
+ runs most games in low resolutions

questions:
- sound over hdmi , does this work with all of above options?
- I've read somewhere that the igpu's can't do 2* vdpau de-interlacing
- What else is important to look at?
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#2
I have a 9400 IGP solution and can confirm I've got XBMC sound over HDMI working under Linux - though it took a bit of tweaking.

The 8200/8300 and 9300/9400 IGPs have multichannel PCM HDMI capable hardware, whereas the nVidia graphics cards will only stream an external SPDIF source AIUI - though the new generation of nVidia cards launching or about to launch DO have on-board HDMI Audio devices capable of multichannel PCM output.

I've had my 9400 IGP running multichannel PCM under Win 7 with PowerDVD with no problems (True HD and DTS HD MA lossless tracks decoded to PCM and output via HDMI) - but I don't know if XBMC supports decoding to PCM multichannel. (At the moment I'm bitstreaming DD/DTS via HDMI as I don't have any XBMC playback sources with True HD or DTS HD audio)
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#3
So long as it has 512MB of VRAM there's no difference. Any GPU in the nvidia driver's readme that supports VDPAU will work the same. No sense over complicating things.
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#4
@noggin thanks for your information this helped to direct my search.

althekiller Wrote:So long as it has 512MB of VRAM there's no difference. Any GPU in the nvidia driver's readme that supports VDPAU will work the same. No sense over complicating things.
Your simplifying my question. Besides the fact that the 8300 has an bug so it can't show every resulution... I was asking questions in a wider scope (e.g. sound over hdmi and deinterlacing capacity of the gpu's).

Please correct me if I'm wrong:
1) the bob 2* deinterlacing (or whatever it is called) can not be done by budget cards (maybe the 9400 igp?).

2) energy consumption is certainly not the same on these solutions

3) lossless audio isn't yet supported on any gpu, only on the igp's (as far as I know, but certainly not on al)

Who knows what else. I like to have the fact straigh before choosing my hardware.
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