HD 2600 PRO - dissapointed by performance

[kreib]

Hi,
I have a HD 2600 Pro AGP on an old motherboard, the Asus P4S533 with a 2.0 GHz pentium processor. I run XP with the lastest drivers for the card (used the MSI Live update service). Im using VGA to a LCD with 1440x900 res. The board only support AGP 4X.

When playing some HD I found at http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...nture_1080.exe ,
performance is not very good at all. Sure, I can see the pictures, and colors and sharpeness seems very good. But the playback is not smooth, i.e. it stops up for half a second now and then.

Yes, the system is kinda outdated, but I am wondering if this result is as excpected or if I should be able to get better performance.

[Melcar]

As far as I know, HD playback in Linux can't (currently) be offloaded to the GPU like in Windows, so your CPU will be doing most of the work.

[Forge]

Well, since he said he's running Windows XP, I think he's on the wrong website entirely.

[bridgman]

DriverHeaven is a pretty good place to go for XP driver issues. For the moment, my first question would be whether you have enough system memory. Running HD video lights up a lot of OS and driver code, and it sounds like you might be swapping...

[kreib]

DriverHeaven is a pretty good place to go for XP driver issues. For the moment, my first question would be whether you have enough system memory. Running HD video lights up a lot of OS and driver code, and it sounds like you might be swapping...

I have 1279 MB DDR installed.

I didnt realize this is Linux only until after I posted, soorry about that.

[kreib]

Well, since he said he's running Windows XP, I think he's on the wrong website entirely.

I have latest kubuntu installed too, but since HD playback was not smooth I decided to try xp. I did a phoronix test, check out the results:

ATI fgl_glxgears 10 Seconds FPS HIB BAR_GRAPH fgl-glxgears -loop 10000 1 754.92 Processor: Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.00GHz @ 2.00GHz (Total Cores: 1), Motherboard: System Manufacturer System Version, Chipset: SiS, System Memory: 1265MB, Disk Space: 5GB, Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro AGP, Screen Resolution: 1440x900 OS: Ubuntu 8.04, Kernel: 2.6.24-18-generic (i686), X.Org Server: 1.4.0.90, OpenGL: 2.1.7412 (fglrx), Compiler: GCC 4.2.3, File-System: ext2/ext3 dhave June 8, 2008 08:36 PM Compiz and Firefox were running on this system. 1.0.0 1 fglglxgears fgl-glxgears 1.0.0 This test calculates the average frame-rate within the ATI fgl_glxgears test. Demo Michael Larabel

[Forge]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you wouldn't receive help and would be ejected, just that I imagine most folks here know Linux first, Windows second or not at all.

My take on things is that your CPU is just way way way too slow. I can just barely get 720p x264 playing smoothly on my Pentium M 1.6GHz. You've got 400MHz on me, but you're also running a very old model of Pentium 4.

Basically, if you're in Windows, you might get lucky with a horribly accelerated layout, the media player, codec, and hardware all running 100%.

In Linux we can't get access to some of the proprietary video decode acceleration stuff due to retarded legal restrictions.

With no hardware decode acceleration the very slow CPU you have, I don't think there's a snowball's chance in Hell that you'll get smooth 1080p playback. In Windows, with the decode fully functional it probably still wouldn't be enough.

I'd give some serious thought to some upgrades if you aspire to HD video playback.

[kreib]

With no hardware decode acceleration the very slow CPU you have, I don't think there's a snowball's chance in Hell that you'll get smooth 1080p playback.

But hw accel was to come to this system with the new grapchics card, and with acceleration it would be working, or at least that was the plan. Surely, when people are told theire old system can be still usefull with a small upgrade, this is a tempting offer.

[Extreme Coder]

Well, IMO if it says it can fully decode HD videos in hardware then the rest of the hardware shouldn't make that much of an issue, right?

[bridgman]

The rest of the hardware definitely makes less difference, but you still have to push a heck of a lot of data back and forth.

Hmmm.... hard drive directly connected to the GPU... hmmm...