video card confusion

[nitrogen_widget]

I have a Radian HD4650 & a Geforce 8400GS PCI-E video cards.
Even though the geforce has lower specs accross the board, my cpu is lower using it for anything HD.

OTA HDTV, HD mkv's ect.

The difference isn't huge but it's noticeable on my single core CPU when it comes to 1080 content.

Is it drivers or do the geforce cards just work that much better than the radeon cards when it comes to XP & HD?

[Reddwarf]

What OS are you running and how much cpu does the different cards actually use? What Catalyst version?

[nitrogen_widget]

XP & latest driver for catalyst as of 3 weeks ago.
I havn't switched or checked to see if a newer driver is out since I put the Nvidia card in.

We are talking almost 100% cpu on Hulu desktop for Radeon card Vs. %80 CPU with Nvidia.

Would windows 7 be a better choice with the radeon card?

[Reddwarf]

That's strange, normally the radeon card should support DXVA and not load the cpu by far that much. I don't know hulu desktop, is it an addon to XP? And I suppose you have DirectX installed?

[nitrogen_widget]

That's strange, normally the radeon card should support DXVA and not load the cpu by far that much. I don't know hulu desktop, is it an addon to XP? And I suppose you have DirectX installed?

hulu desktop is a flash based video player for hulu.com
It uses the latest flash beta that supports hardware acceleration.

without hardware acceleration i'm looking at a slide show.
I do have a cpu upgrade in the mail so i'll see how that works.
I'd like to use the radeon for windows & the Nvidia for linux because support is much better when it comes to playing OTA HD.

[Reddwarf]

I'm running a Radeon 3450 on XP SP3 and viewing HD takes about 18-21% cpu on an Athlon 64 X2 6000.

[pBS]

try the 9.11/12 drivers as i thnk the newest ones weren't that great..
that card works great in win7....but in xp i saw high memory usage, while it did accelerate fine...it used about 300megs extra memory than any other card..
so i think the xp drivers for it are kinda buggy...
somewhere between 9.3 and 9.12 is the sweet spot for those cards for xp..
latest ones have that stupid ati unified installer junk in them...

oh and i think you're supposed to uninstall flash before using the new accelerated one or it doesn't work right..

did you check by right clicking on video to make sure accell is turned on in flash plugin?

[nitrogen_widget]

Mainly my biggest desire is hulu desktop so I can watch my regular shows on my HDTV.

I followed the procedure for upgrading flash beta.
I think I just need more CPU.

I cleared out decoders & drivers & re-installed. AGAIN. :mad:
This time I used driver cleaner.

1080p blu-ray rips run at almost no cpu usage on my nvidia on XP using the Media player classic decoder in GBPVR now.

OTA HD is the same. It's crazy what these new cards can do.
It wasn't too long ago this PC struggled with OTA HD.

Hulu is watchable now but CPU is still very high. I think flash video is just a horrible resource hog.

I've ordered a dual core CPU for this PC & will probably install windows 7 with that & the radeon since I agree the drivers for XP just arn't that good.

I also want the HDMI output from the radeon card so i'll see how that goes.

[pBS]

may want to try a different browser also...the plugin works differeently in them..
tried the latest ffdshow dxva decoder? it rocks even better than mpchc decoder at same cpu..
have to get the nightlies to get the dxva decoder,it's not in beta7 yet..
plus it adds more audio decoding plus multithreaded mpeg2 decoding fixes..

[nitrogen_widget]

may want to try a different browser also...the plugin works differeently in them..
tried the latest ffdshow dxva decoder? it rocks even better than mpchc decoder at same cpu..
have to get the nightlies to get the dxva decoder,it's not in beta7 yet..
plus it adds more audio decoding plus multithreaded mpeg2 decoding fixes..

i'm not using a browser for hulu.com.
They have their own application for browsing their video's with a media player remote.

I downloaded & installed the latest FFDSHOW nightly.
however I did something wrong in the configuration where it popped up tellin me PVRX2 was trying to use it.
I thought i gave it permission but there is definelty no DXVA going on there.
It was late & I couldn't find how to make GBPVR use it so I went back to MPC decoder.