Slow Response With an Old PC

[chrisv]

I was running AVG free. I disabled it but the results are still the same. Seems like playing back a recording runs a bit smoother than Live TV. CPU usage is the same but it is less choppy. Something tells me I need a new PC. Perhaps a newer video card (as dasi suggested) will help.

[nitrogen_widget]

I ran GBPVR on an Athlon 750 with a gforce 2 mx400 & a pvr 150.
Overlay only & menus were sluggish & live TV gave very high CPU.

I switched to a geforce 5200 & that took cpu down to about %25 in overlay.
VMR was more around %75 but nothing stuttered.

Menus were faster with the 5200 also, but nothing spectacular speed wise.

[ChiPPy]

Have you tried running in VMR9 Fullscreen exclusive mode? As strange as it sounds, on my set up, it actually runs smoother than Overlay mode. VMR 9 and VMR 9 Custom eat the CPU to death, and VMR 7 just seems to be plain useless.... None of the benefits of VMR 9, and double the CPU power of Overlay.

[chrisv]

I tried all modes. It plays ok, but the CPU is pretty high and it freezes very often. Overlay uses the least amount of CPU. Pausing Live TV is pretty much impossible regardless of the mode being used, and that is a big part of what I want to do (connected to a TV). Oh well - looks like I have to start thinking about a new PC.

Thanks to all for the help. I'll be posting another thread on suggested hardware for my new PC.

[chrisv]

I decided to take the plunge and buy a new PC. Specs are included in my signature. Now, for the initial results. CPU is way down which is fantastic. No more freezeing. The only problem I am experiencing now is the stuttering/choppy playback. I'm quite surprised at this since my PC has more than enough horsepower to handle SD content. I notice the choppiness both on LiveTV and playing back a recording. Vista Home Premium is my OS. I installed the latest MB BIOS (1101) and the Catalyst 7.8 drivers. I allocated 256M RAM to the onboard GPU. No virus scanner running in the background. Tried using a bunch of different decoders (video, audio and audio renderer) with no luck. Some were better than others in terms of quality (Cyberlink PowerDVD 7 being the best) but they were all choppy. Scrolling text along the screen is horrible as well.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[sub]

You may have the quartz.dll problem, where most people have to downgrade quartz.dll form v9.0c to v9.0b. There is some discussion about it here: http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=5600 (and in lots of other threads)

[chrisv]

I'll confirm this when I get home from work, but I'm pretty sure Vista installs DirectX 10, in which case I'm assuming the quartz.dll problem will not be an issue.

[sub]

Yeah, I wouldnt install it on Vista.

[chrisv]

Do you recommend Vista with GBPVR, or is XP a better option?

[sub]

It should be ok with either, though admittedly I found XP a bit better for video stuff. I use Vista on my development and it works well, though not quite as well for video stuff did on XP on the same hardware.

It seems to work well when you're not doing anything else on the machine, but as soon as move windows around etc its easy to make the video stutter - case of Windows use of Direct3D user interface interfering with video playback on the same video card.