[wplug] video card power consumption

[Patrick Wagstrom]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 09:35 -0400, Patrick Wagstrom wrote:
>> Actually, offloading video work to the cards is accomplished using XvMC, 
>> something that Intel, NVidia, and Via Unichrome chips support.
> 
> There are different types of Xv* support.  Some do a better job of
> overlaying than others.

I'm not concerned about the drivers being fully featured.  I'm only 
concerned about their support for the standard XvShmPutImage command and 
possible some of the Xv color controls.  This is the most basic level of 
Xv support you can get and has been around for a very long time.  My 
Matrox Mystique supported this level of Xv back in 1997.

ATI won't work because their XvShmPutImage for both the open source and 
fglrx drivers max out at 1024x1024 images, which does not work for HD 
signals.  nVidia, Intel, and Via all will work just fine.

XvMC is low priority because unichrome are the only chips that support 
MPEG-4 offloading and that's what MythTV transcodes recordings to. 
Also, using XvMC on anything beyond a nvidia 5000 series requires that 
overlays are black and white due to the lack of chromakey driver support.

With that being said, I'll reiterate my original posting.  I'm just 
looking for something that gives me a rough power consumption comparison 
of cards.  In idle and while the card is actually doing something 
(video, 3d, whatever).  If you'd like to post your thoughts on why intel 
and every other card manufacturer sucks, please start your own thread 
because it only serves to confuse the issue.  I assure you that once I 
know the power consumption of a card I can do the research on my own to 
figure out if a card suits my needs, there is no need to add noise to 
the discussion.

--Patrick