Advice on adding old GPU to a perfectly working x86 system

    Hello

    I have a FX8320 CPU running on a Mobo that has an integrated Radeon HD 3000 in it. LibreELEC runs fine, even for HEVC, except when content is 4k, where it stutters. 1080p plays fine for any codec.

    I have laying around an old Radeon 7750 1GB DDR5 GPU that I could put in. Would it do any good? If not, alternatively, I will possibly have, in the near future, a GTX1060 I could add. Would that allow playing HEVC 4k?

    Thanks!

    Radeon HD 7000 series - Wikipedia
    en.wikipedia.org

    RadeonFeature

    If you correlate the "Southern Islands" features between ^ those two the 7550 card is 1080p max so it's not going to improve on the existing card that you have. I would also avoid the nVidia card (unless it's $free) because there is zero support for nvidia cards in the Generic/GBM image (our long-term technical direction) and whilst Generic-Legacy still exists and still supports them under X11 and it will do 4K, most 4K content is now HDR and X11 means no HDR support.

    So I guess that means the UVD 4.0 of the HD 7750, whilst being better than the UVD 1.0 of the HD 3000, still would not offload any work from CPU while decoding HEVC... bummer...

    Thanks for the advice.

    Another thing, though - I have noticed that, when playing stuttering 4k video, my FX8320 still does not seem maxed out at all (looking at CPU usage on the system section of Kodi). Maybe there is something else I could do on that front?

    The best upgrade would be to a recent-ish Intel motherboard with integrated graphics, as those are going to support HEVC + 4K and most of the recent ones do HDR too (although HDR support is still work-in-progress in Kodi). I can't advise anything specific though as I didn't run an Intel CPU device for LE/OE use in the last decade (only ARM boards) and Intel breeds "lake" codenamed chips faster than I can keep tabs on the damn things.

    Quote from chewitt

    The best upgrade would be to a recent-ish Intel motherboard with integrated graphics, as those are going to support HEVC + 4K and most of the recent ones do HDR too (although HDR support is still work-in-progress in Kodi). I can't advise anything specific though as I didn't run an Intel CPU device for LE/OE use in the last decade (only ARM boards) and Intel breeds "lake" codenamed chips faster than I can keep tabs on the damn things.

    Minimum Kaby Lake for decoding HEVC in Linux. Won’t encode though. Later GPU required for that. Sky Lake did HEVC decoding in Windows using a hybrid driver but that wasn’t ported to Linux. For LE definitely an ARM processor to maximise graphics output performance.