x2 4400+ enough for 720p playback?

D

dorky82

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 11, 2009
Messages
334
My dad computer is having hard time running 720p avi files.

x2 4400+
2gb memory
windows7
s3 internal gpu

Tried using coreavc codec but its still not running good.
sound skip and little lag on video
Do I need to upgrade his video card to run 720p smooth?
 
My X2-4400+ with 1Gig RAM runs 720p youtube videos fine as well as downloaded 720p mp4 files, so yes, the X2-4400+ is enough for 720p. I would point to the S3 graphics as being your problem. Any low-end cheap gpu of the last few generations will be able to push 720p, so no need to go all out on anything fancy.
 
I agree with buyers. I still have an Athlon Toledo S939 x2 3800 and plays 720p files fine. Change the video card with a cheap 5450.
 
Even without any GPU Hardware acceleration, the X2 4400 should be more than enough to play 720p. I have an X2 4200 in my Home Theater PC and I play 1080p videos all the time. It doesn't matter which player I use, media center, media player classic (which only uses CPU), VLC (AFAIK only uses CPU), etc. etc.

My guess is that the particular video you are trying to view uses a codec you don't have, you have a setting is set wrong, or the video is simply a poorly recompressed.
 
dorky82 said:
My dad computer is having hard time running 720p avi files.

x2 4400+
2gb memory
windows7
s3 internal gpu

Tried using coreavc codec but its still not running good.
sound skip and little lag on video
Do I need to upgrade his video card to run 720p smooth?
Click to expand...
Since his computer has an 'S3 IGP' I'll take that it is using either a VIA K8M800 (AGP) or K8M890 (PCI-E) chipset. If it is using the K8M800, the 'best' card you may find for it is either a Radeon 3850/4650 or a Geforce 8600GT/9600SE, if it has the K8M890, then something like a low-end Radeon 5450/6450 or GeForce G210 would do well.
 
it will do it but it pegs both cores so depending on whats running in the background it may have issues.

my 4200+ will do 720 fine as long as i don't ask it do so any thing else, most if the time i try to find h264 movies so i can use my video card to do all the work with media player classic- home cinema. if he watches movies a lot any ati/amd hd 3000 or newer, and nvidia 9xxx series or newer will work and take the load off the cpu. without it i'm both cores 100%, with it im maybe bother cores 20% with everything else running.

however running a simular system to you fathers i can definatly say its long in the tooth. a new pentium g620 duel core is $78 shipped and that will do all the acceleration from its onboard gpu and run circles around our old machines. a mother board is $49 (or $39 after rebate) shipped and 4 gigs of ram is only $25 shipped

a new machine is around $150 and he would be good to go for another 6 years. adding a video card will be cheaper but they dont accelerate all formats so his cpu will still be a bottle neck some times.
 
I'm running an old s939 X2 4400+ with a Nvidia 6600GT card in the living room and it runs 720p .mkv's fine in VLC. It's running Windows XP and i'm streaming it from my main Windows 7 machine.
 
If its a PCI-E board just drop $20-ish on a 5450/210/8400 and you're good to go.
If its an AGP board you might want to consider an upgrade; good AGP cards are painfully expensive.
 
Hell, I just got done installing a Dell GX270 (P4 2.6, GF4 MX 440) that plays 720p videos just fine.
 
I'm using a stock Opteron 165 w/2gigs for my htpc and it plays 720p (Netflix/YouTube/HDbits) just fine.

There's probably some system resouces that are being less than cooperative since you said this was your dads system and I'm assuming that the technical type that we are.
 
canna said:
The DXVA hardware acceleration in MPC-HC requires a video card that supports it, and to my knowledge no S3 onboard like the OP has supports this feature.
Click to expand...

Change your media player since your GPU cannot offload any of the video post-processing.

If you are using VLC, switch to HC-MPC as it is far more stable under a Windows OS.
If you are on a Linux distro, stick with VLC.
 
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kuyaglen said:
I'm using a stock Opteron 165 w/2gigs for my htpc and it plays 720p (Netflix/YouTube/HDbits) just fine.

There's probably some system resouces that are being less than cooperative since you said this was your dads system and I'm assuming that the technical type that we are.
Click to expand...

What GPU are you using? You are probably offloading the video post-processing to your GPU/IGP and you don't even know it, especially with Flash.

I know for a fact 720p Flash video will not run smoothly on an Opteron 165 @ stock speeds.
Hell, my 5000+ dual-core AM2 @ stock can barely run 720p Flash without a GPU to offload the post-processing to.
 
My 4600+ 89w can play a 1080p @ 900p with an AMD x1250 igp........ 8400 gs for pci or a 6450 for pcie.
 
nvm, was talking about uncompressed 1080p, not what I meant.
 
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Not sure what you're going off about Red Falcon. An AMD X2 can do 1080p h264 just fine with a multi-threaded software decoder, which is why it has long been popular for HTPCs.

With my AMD X2 4800+ @ stock (2.4Ghz), Blu-ray playback with multi-channel audio always flawless. For most 1080p my CPU usually hovers around 40-60% load.
 
AMD X2 939's have not been popular for HTPCs, where did you pull that one out of?

Not sure what you're going off about Red Falcon.
Click to expand...
nvm, was talking about uncompressed 1080p.
 
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Red Falcon said:
What GPU/IGP are you using? More than likely your CPU can do this because the majority of the work is being offloaded to the GPU.
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7800GTX 512MB (see sig). It only supports hardware decode of mpeg2 and wmv. Support for full h264 decode wasn't added until sometime in the GeForce 8-series.

Red Falcon said:
With my AM2 5000+ X2, if I turn off hardware decoding, 1080p H.264 is barely playable.
Click to expand...
Then something is messed up with your computer like the OP.

Red Falcon said:
AMD X2 939's have not been popular for HTPCs, where did you pull that one out of?
I'm sure they work fine for them if paired with a GPU that can handle post-processing, not denying that.
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They were popular for low-cost HTPCs up until ~2007 because they could decode 1080p in software if needed. Post-processing on 1080p while at the same time decoding in software is another story. Things like denoising 1080p or deinterlacing 1080i are a no-go. Higher frame-rate content like 1080p @ 50/60fps is also usually a no go. Your standard 23.976/25/29.970fps content is all fine.

Red Falcon said:
What I'm saying is that these old CPUs cannot handle the load of 1080p video on their own, they need much of the work to be offloaded to a GPU which has post-processing capabilities.
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No they don't. Hell, I can play 10bit 1080p H264 content up to ~35Mbps. You couldn't even buy a hardware decoder for 10bit H264 if you wanted to.
 
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As far as the OP is concerned, yes, something is screwed up, he should be able to play 720p easily as well as 1080p H.264 or similar encoding.
At this point though, I think he is not using a decent media player.


EDIT:

You know what, I think I misworded what I wrote. Uncompressed 1080p won't run well on older processors, I didn't mean H.264 1080p. Herpaderp... wow, one of those nights. :eek:
Yes, you are correct, standard 1080p content using H.264 should run fine, even on an older single core processor back to the 2004-era.

nvm what I wrote above. @_@

Going back to edit some posts...
 
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Red Falcon said:
You know what, I think I misworded what I wrote. Uncompressed 1080p won't run well on older processors, I didn't mean H.264 1080p. Herpaderp... wow, one of those nights. :eek:
Yes, you are correct, standard 1080p content using H.264 should run fine, even on an older single core processor back to the 2004-era.
Click to expand...
Uncompressed content is a disk bottleneck not a cpu bottleneck, so I think you are still confused about something.
Uncompressed is extremely easy to decode compared to h264. I'm seeing no more than 10% CPU load with uncompressed 1080p YUV or RGB.

Blu-rays are limited to 8bit 1080p h264 at ~50Mbps = AMD X2 @ 2.4Ghz handles this fine
10bit 1080p h264 at ~35Mbps (40% slower decode than 8bit) = AMD X2 @ 2.4Ghz handles this fine
Uncompressed 1080p = Any CPU should be able to handle this if you have a fast HDD array


Back on topic. I wouldn't be surprised if the S3 GPU is the problem though. Looking on S3's website, they only have drivers for WinXP and WInVista. Depending on how well S3's Vista drivers work under Win7, one possibility is that 2D/3D hardware acceleration are disabled and everything is running under software-emulation. The other possibility is the GPU is so slow, that it's unable to render high-resolution textures fast enough. If you are running Aero, try disabling it and see if things are any better. The S3 S27 only has 64MB or RAM, which is barely enough for Aero. Also, if you are not already, try using Overlay mode in your media player.
 
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I think you might be right about that, never thought of it that way, good call, thanks for the info.
 
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