I will try to include as much relevant information as possible, so please forgive the data dump.
Premise:
I am looking to enable GPU support/rendering of HD content on my AMD HD 4650 AGP video card while keeping the amount of actual AMD software installed to an absolute minimum.
Details:
I am running a SuperMicro X5DA8 system with dual Xeon 3.2Ghz 32-bit hyperthreading processors (the maximum that the E7505 chipset can recognize… 64-bit processors are NOT an option for this platform). Since I have more than 4Gb of memory on the machine,I needed to go to a version of 32-bit Windows that could actually see more than 4Gb, and that was Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition (luckily I recently retired one of my older servers!). Using the /PAE switch, I can now see my installed 8Gb (the machine can take up to 12Gb)
My video card is the ATI (now AMD) Radeon HD 4650 AGP with 1GB of RAM. I have installed the drivers and ONLY the drivers, to keep the amount of in-memory software at a minimum. I am also finding that Server 2003 R2 is FAR SUPERIOR to XP 32-bit in providing me with a stable platform. Prior to this, XP always had massive issues getting this video card to work correctly, much less across dual 1600×1200 HP LP2065 (the good versions) monitors (XP always had a bad habit of dropping one monitor down into a virtual scrolling desktop, and showing only a 640×480 “peephole” of a 1600×1200 desktop; about ⅔ of the time a reboot was the only option).
I have downloaded the driver package straight from AMD (and I got the correct AGP driver set, too) and extracted it to my secondary drive. From there, I went into my hardware management console and hand-installed the drivers for the video card itself.
When I now play HD content, it uses the CPU. Granted, 720p content is fine as long as I don’t maximize the MPC-HC player, but I want to maximize it as well as see 1080p content as well.
From what I understand, installing the drivers for the video card is not enough. Apparently, the ATI/AMD software needs installing as well, in particular a single file/program is needed to allow software on the computer to bridge their processing requirements over to the GPU.
I want to avoid installing as much ATI/AMD software as possible, to keep my boot times short and my overhead low. I am hoping that someone more experienced in the graphics card end of things might be able to help me get GPU support up and running without having to install the entire Catalyst Control Centre (which has traditionally been a big resource hog for me, as I use virtually no other functions other than GPU HD rendering).
