New secondary monitor problem

[Mysteryman]

For the "start on second monitor" folks, do you take a big performance hit on the video of GBPVR? Maybe its just my old Radeon 9800, but whenever I run GB on the non-primary its horribly jittery and slow.

I assumed this was a function of the video card assigning the most resources to the display marked "primary".

[sub]

For the "start on second monitor" folks, do you take a big performance hit on the video of GBPVR? Maybe its just my old Radeon 9800, but whenever I run GB on the non-primary its horribly jittery and slow.

This happens if you try to use VMR9 Custom or VMR9 Fullscreen Exclusive on a second monitor. This is because the 3D hardware acceleration used by these renderers is not available on a second monitor, so behind the scenes Direct3D ends up making some off screen buffer where all the frames are copied, and then copied again from the buffer to the screen (and all copied in software).

[liteswap]

I bow to your superior knowledge of such stuff, sub, but is that universal? I run GB-PVR on a second monitor with VMR9 Custom without any glitches at all. This remains true if I use the nVidia driver's hardware option (which now works perfectly without screen corruption - thank you) or pretty much any other renderer.

[sub]

To be honest I'm not sure. If its working fine for you, then I'd say there must be some situations where it doesnt apply. Maybe nvidia 7xxx series can do it. If its not doing it, then its pretty noticeable.

I know its certainly a problem with lots of other video card including the 6xxx series cards.

[liteswap]

You could be right there, then. Mine's a 7300LE.

[Mysteryman]

This happens if you try to use VMR9 Custom or VMR9 Fullscreen Exclusive on a second monitor. This is because the 3D hardware acceleration used by these renderers is not available on a second monitor, so behind the scenes Direct3D ends up making some off screen buffer where all the frames are copied, and then copied again from the buffer to the screen (and all copied in software).

Hmm, that's very good information. I've been looking at upgrading the box GBPVR is running on. I think my video card (Radeon 9800 pro 128MB) is the bottleneck (Athlon XP mobile at ~3Ghz, 768MB RAM).

When I'm shopping, what numbers on a video card are the most important to GB-PVR? I know it does some Direct3D, so straight polygon count, or should I bother with getting a card with more pixel or vertex shaders? Or just focus on faster MPEG acceleration?

[sub]

When I'm shopping, what numbers on a video card are the most important to GB-PVR? I know it does some Direct3D, so straight polygon count, or should I bother with getting a card with more pixel or vertex shaders? Or just focus on faster MPEG acceleration?

To be honest, I couldnt answer your question - I just know that video acceleration doesnt work on the second monitor output with most graphics cards.

I've only used the couple of video cards I have, and we dont have HDTV in our part of the world.

[liteswap]

I can report that activating hardware acceleration on my 7300LE nVidia card does now work. It lowers the CPU load significantly when playing back/decoding (it's now around 50% rather than 75%), and the scrambled screen bug seems to have disappeared with the latest rev of GB-PVR.

Is it just me?