[ingrimsch]

Hi Ingrimsch ! Thanks for all the feedback. I really appreciate it.
You are right that there are some high bitrate h264 files play with low fps.
Now it is completely different thing than what we had with with surface reuse problem. I have e sense that we have some lack of gpu resource here as the gpu is not rendering enough frames/second. Note that with the gpu we decode h264, render and it is scaling the image with shaders in one time. Maybe this is too much for the core i3 gpu. One user wrote that overclocking the gpu helped him. I think we already having a huge improvement with drivers as a few months back i was not able to have 25fps with bicubic upscaler on. Now we have more that 60. That's a great improvement already. I think it will be better and better. Also i am very much looking forward to the new Sandy Bridge motherboards and cpus. They will be 2x fast with all tasks with a 35-45W TDP. They will surely handle any h264 file without even having vaapi.

Overclocking definately helps, it seems to be a limitation of the gpu, I tried it and the stuttering MKVs play all smooth now. Maybe I'll measure both versions (OCed VAAPI vs. CPU Decoding) with a Power Meter tomorrow... would be interested to know what helps most in the means of saving energy just out of interest

Disappointed might be the wrong term. I changed from an Atom/Ion Combo to the I3 only Version, so I see the I3 VAAPI shortcomings to the ION setup I had before, but they are really not as bad as i make them sound. Following the evolution of this thread and VAAPI makes me believe there might be hope for better high bitrate performance. This was just a problem NV Ion users like me dont know about, high bitrate is no problem there. But using a Lanczos upscaler for example kills the Ion performance wise. The iGPU/VAAPI is way better on that front. Or used to kill as I havent tested this again lately. I also really like that I can use the nice Compiz visuals and XBMC at the same time without rendering one useless to enjoy the other. This is also something an ION user can only dream about until today.

But apart from all that the I3 can still render everything in software if all else fails. I'll keep the I3, and watch this thread closely to see what the time will bring. I'm sure the EDID detection will get fixed and there might be more small revolutions like the perfomance gain you mentioned before on the way. Again: Thanks for collecting the information, summing it all up and spoonfeeding the lazy masses (like me)