I am having some frame rate issues when watching HD content on my PC. I am trying to watch videos on my PC through my 720p Sony HDTV. Below are my specs:
Nvidia 7600gt
Pentium 4 2.8ghz
2gb RAM
Is my computer just not beefy enough? Which one is the bottleneck? I'm usually trying to watch 720p content.
Both your CPU and GPU could be a bottleneck, but try switching the program that you're playing stuff with before going down that path. I've had certain players be laggy and others not.
Also make sure your video drivers are as up to date as possible.
The 7600GT doesn't have any of the HD decoding codecs that can be done on-chip, so the CPU is doing all the work.
Switching out the video card to a 9000-series Nvidia GPU, or one of the higher-end 8000-series GPU's might help out a lot. Those have HD codec decoding that can be done on-chip.
If you can upgrade the CPU, going to a dual-core CPU will help out a huge bit as well.
[quote name='shrike4242']Switching out the video card to a 9000-series Nvidia GPU, or one of the higher-end 8000-series GPU's might help out a lot. Those have HD codec decoding that can be done on-chip.[/QUOTE]
He has a P4, so I'm willing to bet that his motherboard doesn't have PCI-E, which means 8k and 9k Geforce cards will be out of the question.
[quote name='CoffeeEdge']He has a P4, so I'm willing to bet that his motherboard doesn't have PCI-E, which means 8k and 9k Geforce cards will be out of the question.[/QUOTE]
Not necessarily true. My old Dell PC was a P4 and it had PCI-E, and the motherboard wasn't dual/quad-core compatible either.
[quote name='CoffeeEdge']He has a P4, so I'm willing to bet that his motherboard doesn't have PCI-E, which means 8k and 9k Geforce cards will be out of the question.[/quote]
I do have PCI-E, but I can't slap an 8 or 9 series card in my computer because I would have to upgrade the power supply. Even then, I still don't have a multi-core processor, so I might as well just buy a new computer.
Thanks for the input guys; you helped answer my question.
My htpc has an amd 4850e dual core with a 780g mobo (matx gigabyte) that has an onboard ati card and runs hd flawlessly. It was cheap as shit too. Can't really play modern games for shit but that's not what I wanted it to do.
For many newer codecs, it isn't the number of cores in the CPU that makes the difference. It's the newer generation of SSE functions, both in new instructions and improved implementation of the earlier ones, that serve to greatly improve playback performance.
So a new system can solve the problem. Just not for the most seemingly obvious reason.
Also, if gaming isn't a major concern, you can get a very low priced video card from the latest generation that offers pretty the same codec performance as the higher end models with much stronger 3D capability due to a greater number of execution units onboard. This is also applicable to some of the latest integrated video solutions from AMD/ATI and Nvidia.
So, you can get a new inexpensive machine that'll do the job while going cheap on the video, leaving it as an option for later upgrade.
[quote name='shrike4242']The video card is the issue as well as the CPU.
The 7600GT doesn't have any of the HD decoding codecs that can be done on-chip, so the CPU is doing all the work.
Switching out the video card to a 9000-series Nvidia GPU, or one of the higher-end 8000-series GPU's might help out a lot. Those have HD codec decoding that can be done on-chip.
If you can upgrade the CPU, going to a dual-core CPU will help out a huge bit as well.[/quote]
Any ATI cards from the 3000 or 4000 will do HD better than any from Nvidia.
[quote name='bigl523']My htpc has an amd 4850e dual core with a 780g mobo (matx gigabyte) that has an onboard ati card and runs hd flawlessly. It was cheap as shit too. Can't really play modern games for shit but that's not what I wanted it to do.[/quote]
780 has a great on board video chipset and is suited for HTPC because of it. That and any later chipsets would be a good buy, cheap too.
Overall, HD can be handled on the GPU just fine and can a P4 shouldn't be a limiting factor so much. Dual core won't benefit anything... no players support multicore... as far as I know.
[quote name='xycury']Any ATI cards from the 3000 or 4000 will do HD better than any from Nvidia.
780 has a great on board video chipset and is suited for HTPC because of it. That and any later chipsets would be a good buy, cheap too.
Overall, HD can be handled on the GPU just fine and can a P4 shouldn't be a limiting factor so much. Dual core won't benefit anything... no players support multicore... as far as I know.[/QUOTE]
There is more to it than that. The division of labor throughout the PC can make the difference. If you have a bunch of single threaded apps not being properly distributed between the cores, you can manually assign an app to run on a preferred core. Thus, pinning your player app to the second core can give it a lot more processor cycles due to reduced competition.
This shouldn't be necessary if you're running the current versions of everything. The compilers themselves are pretty thread savvy nowadays and produce binaries that are better handled automatically by the OS.
Lot of misinformation going around... multicore does help and your GPU will only make a difference in playing back discs (bluray, hddvd, dvd). When playing local files the media player decodes the file, so it's software decoding, so your CPU handles it. A good CPU can make up for a shit GPU but not vice versa.
Ghetto proof of multicore advantage:
720p video started before the spike in CPU usage, Q6600 using WMC, all four cores utilized, two for video and two for sound
[quote name='Koggit']Lot of misinformation going around... multicore does help and your GPU will only make a difference in playing back discs (bluray, hddvd, dvd). When playing local files the media player decodes the file, so it's software decoding, so your CPU handles it. A good CPU can make up for a shit GPU but not vice versa.
Ghetto proof of multicore advantage:
720p video started before the spike in CPU usage, Q6600 using WMC, all four cores utilized, two for video and two for sound
This is simply wrong. A properly written playback app doesn't care where the data resides. If the codec invokes local hardware it doesn't matter if it comes off a disc, a hard drive, a flash drive in a USB port. The only issue is whether the the PC says, "Ah, this is VC-1. I've got some hardware to offload this to and I'm going to use it."
Some people have gotten confused because their local residing files were typically in formats like Xvid that lacked hardware support until fairly recently, while MPEG-2 acceleration of varying levels has been in virtually every decent video chip for many years.
Dedicated hardware can make a huge difference. Consider that both the NES and the TurboGrafx-16 were both 6502 systems. It was the rest of the hardware that made the difference. A similar comparison can be drawn between the Sega Genesis and Neo-Geo, both of which were using MC68000 and Z80 processors.
When DVD first appeared, PC playback required a dedicated decoder board. It wasn't until the first generation of x86 CPUs with MMX came out that the job could be done in software. Even then, the load was such that it was mediocre playback. A dedicated decoder board remained the way to go for quality playback for quite a while.
What killed off the need for MPEG-2 decoder boards in a PCI slot wasn't the advances in CPUs. The Pentium III did it a lot better but also by then every video chip (they weren't considered GPUs then) had dedicated hardware that offloaded major portions of the load, although not having a full MPEG-2 decode engine. The actual cost in 1999 silicon real estate was about $5 added to a video chip, making it a big win for very low cost, since DVD playback had a lot of wow value at retail then.
So, you don't need a fancy graphics card but you'd have to be bloody ing stupid to not enlist the aid of cheap dedicated silicon. When a $50 video card has complete CODEC acceleration onboard, why place significant load on your $300 CPU when there are better things for it to do or just not burn the wattage?
It would be better stated to say you don't need a high-end 3D card for good video playback. A good GPU is about more than 3D.
[quote name='Koggit']Lot of misinformation going around... multicore does help and your GPU will only make a difference in playing back discs (bluray, hddvd, dvd). When playing local files the media player decodes the file, so it's software decoding, so your CPU handles it. A good CPU can make up for a shit GPU but not vice versa.
Ghetto proof of multicore advantage:
720p video started before the spike in CPU usage, Q6600 using WMC, all four cores utilized, two for video and two for sound
Also, the thread you link is extremely flawed. He presumes that removing his ATI card removed all significant hardware acceleration for video from his system and reverting to the VIA Chrome IGP functionality placed all load on the CPU.
While VIA's video solution aren't widely used in the US, they aren't lacking in the essential features. The chip in question has a full MPEG-2 decode engine onboard and several other features which can be enlisted to improve codec performance. Any media player that queries DirectX for the video hardware function support will get plenty out of this chip above what the CPU along can do without a proportionately greater load.
ing stupid to not enlist the aid of cheap dedicated silicon. When a $50 video card has complete CODEC acceleration onboard, why place significant load on your $300 CPU when there are better things for it to do or just not burn the wattage?