Nvidia Gt1030 vs Haswell IGP?

  • Hey all,

    So, I have a box with Librelec 8.2.5 on it that I have been meaning to upgrade to the latest release for a while but just not gotten around to.

    All of a sudden today it is no longer booting (failing to start Xorg for some strange reason, considering nothing has changed). I'm going to guess the drive got corrupted or something.

    I figured its time to install the newer version anyway, so no great loss.

    My question is this. I understand VDPAU is no longer being developed.

    I have been running my Kodi boxes using Nvidia GPU's (a 1030GT in the main living room, and GT720's on the master bed and guest room) for some time now, as the old MythTV plugin used to constantly crash on the Intel IGP when I originally set things up 5 years ago

    I don't think the crashing problem with Intel IGP is still there, so my question is, as I reinstall LibreElec, am I better off leaving the GT1030 in the machine, or pulling it and using the Haswell IGP on the i5-4570T instead?

    With the GT1030 and VDPAU I had at least some limited 8bit Hevc decode capability, but I have no idea what the capabilities on these older Haswell graphics chips are, and googling has just led to confusion.

    The Wikipedia page on Intel Quicksync groups Ivy Bridge and Haswell together, stating that they only decode mpeg2 and avc, but then I have found other stories suggesting that a partial VP9 and full 8 and 10 bit decode was added in via a driver update I. 2015. U clear what capability is present in Linux drivers.

    If anyone can help un-muddy the waters it would be greatly appreciated.

    Edited 2 times, last by mattlach (September 24, 2019 at 2:52 AM).

  • Well,

    It turns out I had no choice but to stick with the GT1030 for now. I never noticed this before, but apparently the Asus H81M-K motherboard in my HTPC does not have an HDMI port for the on board GPU, only DVI and VGA, and without it I can't get sound in my setup.

    I guess a motherboard and CPU upgrade is in my future, but for now I'm staying on the Nvidia GPU.

  • I never noticed this before, but apparently the Asus H81M-K motherboard in my HTPC does not have an HDMI port for the on board GPU, only DVI and VGA, and without it I can't get sound in my setup.

    It's not part of the DVI standard, but many motherboards support sound over DVI. Check the EFI settings whether you have it.

    If yes, then maybe a DVI <-> HDMI adapter will do the trick. The Haswell platform is popular and has good Linux support - worth to try it.

  • It's not part of the DVI standard, but many motherboards support sound over DVI. Check the EFI settings whether you have it.

    If yes, then maybe a DVI <-> HDMI adapter will do the trick. The Haswell platform is popular and has good Linux support - worth to try it.

    I didn't even know that was possible.

    Thanks for the heads up.