Many users of PD 9 version 2504 are reporting problems using hardware acceleration with AMD graphics cards. I have to turn off all hard acceleration options to produce video files and to burn Blu-rays. I also noticed that PD 9 ver. 2504 is faster with hardware acceleration turned off than ver. 2330a with hardware acceleration turned on. It seems that there is a conflict between PD 9 and AMD drivers.

Thanks to forum members who post experiences like this! Even though the thread regarding USB 3.0 was locked by the moderator this week because it was a non-PD9 topic, I find all of these tips and sharing of experiences with PD9 and associated hardware informative and helpful.

I shopped for a USB 3.0 PCI card today and now I'm going to go run a quick PD9 test to see if encoding is faster on my AMD HD4350 card with all acceleration turned off. Thanks again to everyone who takes the time to share and help!

-Allen in Chicago

BTW..there's an updated version of the ATI Catalyst driver package (ver 11.1) available as of 1/26/2011. Here's a link to the Windows 7, 64-bit description/download page:

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/radeon_win7-64.aspx

Usually I don't see any PD9 performance enhancements or hindrances after downloading the ATI Catalyst packages after they update each month. But from what I'm reading in the release notes for this 11.1 update, those of you with newer 5000/6000 series ATI Graphic Cards should realize a speed increase in various scenarios.

With my older ATI HD4350 video card, PD9 decodes videos at exactly the same speed with the PD9 acceleration on, or off.

-Allen

Tonight I finally got around to updating PD9 to the latest build by installing patch 2504. To my dismay, the basketball game DVD I produced with this latest build looks horrible! Everything looks like it's "bent" when the camera moves..like looking in a funhouse mirror.

I remember reading this thread a few days ago, so I immediately suspected that it was the ATI/AMD Hardware Acceleration bug that PD9 Build-2504 is purported to have.

I unchecked the "Enable Hardware Acceleration" box in PD9 settings, burned another DVD and it looks great.. as usual. It took about 25% longer to decode/burn, but the quality improvement is well worth it.

Apparently, before Build 2504, Hardware Acceleration was not working on my computer, even though the box was checked to enable the capability.

PD9 Build 2504 corrected this, but my guess is that the ATI 4350HD card is not up to the task.

With Hardware Acceleration enabled, my Quad CPU varies from 22% to 24%. (10 min clip burns in 4 minutes)
With Hardeare Acceleration disabled, it varies from 53% to 57%. (10 min clip burns in 6 minutes)
The video being burned to the DVD has no effects, it's just raw footage shot in High-Def and burned straight to DVD in HD-Mpeg-2 4:3 ratio.

GPU-assisted acceleration works great with my 4350 card when it comes to making the latest browsers like IE-9 and Firefox-4 surf the web faster, but it looks like Video Decoding is not its cup of tea.

I've read in other threads that some of you are decoding 10 minute clips in less than 2 minutes. I'll make sure my next computer is a powerhouse like yours!

-Allen in Chicago
HP Pavillion e9220y
8mb RAM
Win 7
Quad Core 2.6mhz cpu
ATI 4350-HD

AllenChicago thanks for your input and results....

Go grab that 11.1 update too. It's just out....

Yep.... a lot of us keep hardware acceleration turned off. I just went to a ATI 5780 card last week just to say I tried ATI, and am very happy so far. But even with using those Nvidia cards a lot of years I always turned off hardware acceleration when I had the option in software.

Whether this is actually true or not, sometime ago I read in a video card forum for Nvidia cards, that when you turn on the hardware acceleration, it of course uses non windows acceleration and that seems to cause issues more than it does not. And may or may not actually accelerate anything.

But even before reading that I still never use hardware acceleration. My best answer is to just trial and error like you have already started doing. To turn out quality may indeed take a little longer, but it should be worth it. Everyone gets bummed out, (a phrase my daughters uses to say all the time) because it takes to long to burn/render a file/DVD in here.

I don't know about you, but when I first started burning CD's (NO DVD's then at all) just for data backup or transfer, you could not have anything running other than your burning software, had to turn off your screen saver, burning usually with Nero then. And it took forever just to save 500 meg of data files in a CD. IF it finalized the process. That was a crap shoot all in itself.

Now I can copy a movie DVD, or render a movie, receive email, let everything that is running keep running, and browse online on youtube at the same time. How quickly we get spoiled.... thanks goodness too.

So to sum it up... keep hardware acceleration turned off... or not... __________________________________________
Windows 8 Pro 64 bit

CyberLink PowerDirector 10 Tutorials
PDtoots PowerDirector Tutorials

**NOTICE**
When you are asked to provide a DXDIAG you go the following link and do part "B". Your posted specs are NOT what we are looking for as they tell us nothing. The specs on the box of your computer mean nothing. The DXDIAG shows us how your computer is configured as it runs.

DXDIAG Link

FYI - the ATI 4350 cannot do hardware acceleration. Check out the ATI site : no APT (accelerated processing technology).

As for monitoring your system resources ATI has a new application found on the same page as the Catalyst drivers, called AMD System Monitor. It shows in real time your CPU, ATI and memory activity. Win 10, i7

I have an ATI 5850 and 11.1 drivers and it does render about 20-25% faster with HA enabled but the final render just seems to have that "more compression" feel to it. Little artefacts like you've increased the compression too much in a JPG photo. It's not that noticeable until you notice it if you know what I mean, then it's really obvious. No HA for me the final quality of non HA rendered video is worth the extra wait.

I don't think this is a PD9 thing, I just think the drivers are not doing such a great job at compressing.

Correct. I find that video shot in low light is especially poor compared to CPU generated compression. And I agree, the 20% improvement is not worth it. Win 10, i7

Quote: FYI - the ATI 4350 cannot do hardware acceleration. Check out the ATI site : no APT (accelerated processing technology).

As for monitoring your system resources ATI has a new application found on the same page as the Catalyst drivers, called AMD System Monitor. It shows in real time your CPU, ATI and memory activity.

HDedit,

Please look at this ATI/AMD 4350HD card specification page...

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-4000/hd-4350/Pages/ati-radeon-hd-4300-specifications.aspx

Doesn't it say under the AVIVO section that Acceleration IS supported?


This page at the Cyberlink PD9 Product site ( http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector/requirements_en_US.html )indicates that only a FEW of the ATI/AMD and NVIDA graphics cards are "supported" by PD9. I would assume that the word "Supported" means that PD9 will accelerate decoding if these cards are used. To me, it's really strange that video cards can be so different from each other, from PD9's point a view. Why would an AMD "2600 series and above" be Supported, yet a 4300 isn't?? If you look at the listing, there's no logic to what cards are supported and which ones are omitted from the list and, therefore, not supported.

Based on what I've been reading in this and other articles, I can do without the GPU acceleration, because I don't do any editing. Just simple offloading from the Canon HG10 and burning of DVDs for 6/7/8th grade basketball coaches.

BUT..what is very annoying (and perplexing) is that PD9 doesn't do anything faster than PD8 did. I have a Windows 7 / 64-bit HP Pavilion. The most trumpeted feature of PD9 at the Cyberlink site and in the advertisements spread across the web is the "Power Director 9 TRUE VELOCITY Rendering Engine".

REF: http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector/truevelocity_en_US.html

Wouldn't you think that on modern 64-bit Windows 7 machine, PD9 would be faster than PD8, thanks to the True Velocity technology? Perhaps I don't have some Windows setting enabled? PD8 was OK, but I expected PD9 to be even better. Oh well... the $71.00 upgrade cost won't break the bank. Hopefully, Cyberlink won't stop working on improvements to PD9, while developing PD10.

-Allen

I think it is faster but most noticeable when you start pushing the system beyond 32bit limitations. This probably isn't the case for you. There is an interesting thread on this forum (sorry not sure where) that did some comparisons between versions, RAM, and project complexity and with a simple project there were no differences between PD8 and 9.