Compatibility with HTPC upgrade A88M-ITX/ac
Compatibility with HTPC upgrade A88M-ITX/ac
Hi everyone! My HTPC features an Asrock A88M-ITX/ac motherboard (A88X chipset) and pairs with an AMD A4-7300 APU that includes Radeon HD Graphics. This is essentially a Radeon HD 8470D iGPU, which currently handles H.264 1080p playback smoothly at up to 60fps. But since my projector is showing signs of wear and I anticipate moving to 4K soon, I’ll need support for HEVC 4K content. Right now it falls short in that area. I’m considering an upgrade but am worried about compatibility. Asrock mainly offers Kaveri and Godavari APUs, which (to the best of my knowledge) lack HEVC hardware decoding. However, their list includes two Carizzo CPUs—those are Athlon X4 models without integrated graphics. I’m also unsure how much processing power would be required to stream HEVC 4K without hardware help. My questions: * Could a Carizzo APU with HEVC support fit this setup? * If not, what alternatives could handle HEVC 4K via software? * As a last option, adding a dedicated GPU might be necessary. I just noticed the PCIe x16 port is currently idle. Any suggestions for upgrades or recommendations? Thanks! Alex
Edited April 23, 2020 by Sunday87_9505
The top choice for a direct replacement drop is the A10-7890. However, A8, A10 Kaveri or Godavari (Kaveri Refresh) chips are also fully capable. Your motherboard can handle them and they feature an integrated GPU using the GCN 2.0 design, whereas your system uses a Terascale 3.0 GPU that was just released before GCN. You should encounter no issues with HEVC on any of these options. Exception: the PRO A10-8850B may not work because ASRock doesn't include it in their supported CPUs list.
You're asking about the requirements for decoding HEVC video. The table you linked indicates that certain hardware, like the Carizzo Chip, is needed. That means software-based decoding might not support all formats without specialized chips. Regarding the A8/A10 Kaveri/Godaveri chips, they are designed to handle HEVC in software, so it's possible with the right setup. The edit date was April 23, 2020.
Additionally, according to the Wikipedia page on video coding engines, HEVC appears first in VCE 3, unlike VCE 2 which is available on Kaveri/Godavari. Most of these Kaveri/Godavari chips are currently sold out in Germany, so I’m checking used options now. I might be able to find an A10 AD785KXBI44JA 95W Kaveri 3700MHz for a reasonable price—hope it works. Edited April 23, 2020 by Sunday87_9505 (typo)
Hello. I purchased a used A10-7860K today and haven't had success with HEVC 4k-10bit decoding yet. I didn't specify 10-bit before, and it wasn't necessary; I just couldn't find 8-bit files for testing at the moment. The players I tried all ran at full CPU usage (4 threads) using Kodi, MPlayer, VLC, etc., on Ubuntu with the Radeon open-source driver. No hardware acceleration worked as expected. MPlayer with -vo gl was nearly fast but still struggled. Any suggestions?
Everything seems fine. I converted some sections from 10bit to 8bit and they work well in 4K using HEVC or H.264. It looks like 10bit playback is significantly worse than 8bit, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. Probably with a projector, HDR isn’t that important anymore—I’ll just need to re-encode the HDR content.