Radeon 9800 slow video playback on second screen

[LordOfLA]

Hey guys!

Got a minor issue thats puzzling me.

I have me a Powercolor 9800 pro 128 mb on omega 4.2 drivers and xp pro sp1. This is my first time with ati cards.

I use it in dual head mode and like watching anime episodes and stuff on my second screen if working. However sometimes a video will playback and use heaps of processor power and skip a ton of frames on the second screen this is eiter fullscreen or windowed.

If I drag media player classic back to my primary display all is fine and looks hardware accelerated.

Now I have other videos which playback fine on my second screen as if I was playing them on the primary screen.

Any ideas as to why this might be? As a thing I just noticed I dont get all the fancy ATI tabs in the advanced properties of my second display - is this normal? coming from an nvidia gf4 ti 4800 se this is seeming rather strange.

Is there anything I might have missed as a setting or screwed up installing? I cant imagine it being the card at all since dxdiag tests dont display any problems.

I have attached a dxdiag output if you need more info lemme know 🙂

MTIA

Mark

 

[Sazar]

when you installed the ati card. what steps did you take to remove redundant drivers from nvidia from your system...

and also what app are you using to achieve dual monitor display?

also consider perhaps trying out ati's own driver instead of the omega's and see if this helps at all... omega is good but there is nothing wrong with ati's own drivers 🙂

 

[LordOfLA]

when you installed the ati card. what steps did you take to remove redundant drivers from nvidia from your system...

and also what app are you using to achieve dual monitor display?

also consider perhaps trying out ati's own driver instead of the omega's and see if this helps at all... omega is good but there is nothing wrong with ati's own drivers 🙂

It was a clean install of windows xp since I was anticipating problems with nvidia drivers any other way.

I'musing windows XP's default "extend my desktop onto this display" with the ati - nvidia had nview as well.

I shall try removing all the stuff todo with ati in control panel and install the stock 4.2 catalyst drivers and see what happens.

I have a feeling its one of those dead simple really obvious things I missed - I'm just clueless when it comes to ati 😛

 

[Sazar]

it could be one of a number of things... personally I am unsure of powercooler's QC standards but it is the standardised fair wrt the design of the board...

I would suggest either dl'ing hydravision from www.ati.com in their drivers and support section or dling and using an app called UltraMon... http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

thats what I used when I had multmonitor support required...

keep in mind its only free for like 30 days or something though...

not sure if it wil help speed things up but there is definitely a bug somewhere which is hampering 2nd display performance... you have dual 400mhz ramdacs so it should not be an issue wrt 2d performance...

 

[LordOfLA]

okay I've uninstalled omega drivers, run the driverheaven cleaner and installed stock ati 4.2 drivers.

mpeg movies playback without a hitch on my second display. Anything else unless its really tiny in a window eats cpu power like it grows on trees and is plain unwatchable.

I never had this problem with my geforce 4 so I'm stumped as to why I'm having it now with a radeon which is a more capable chip comnpared to my geforce...

I'm using ultramon trial to get seperate wallpaper on my two screens already - do you think hydravision will improve performance of other video formats at all?

Its more puzzeling in that its super fast for everything else except non-mpeg video (wmv, avi, quicktime, realvideo, etc)

Thanks for the help so far

Mark

 

[Sazar]

I am not quite sure why you are continuing to have this problem..

I had a 9700pro and was running dual display on it easily with no glitching... am a bit stumped myself since I coulda sworn it was a driver issue...

what exactly are you using for mpeg playback btw...

I would check on www.rage3d.com for any info about dual display situations and see if someone else might have a workaround for it... I'll have a looksee later in the evening to find out if I can help more...

 

[LeeJend]

You did not mention how capable your CPU, memory, HD etc. are.

The fact that the mpegs work indicates a bandwith issue (compressed mpegs use less bandwith to get to the decoder on the video card). A slow HD (fragmented, 5400 rpm etc. maybe an issue), a processor under 2 gig or with a 266 FSB or slow RAM will cause a bottle neck. Maybe (wag) the size of the AGP aperature set in the bios could affetc it. Virus scan or background defrag set on will steal bandwidth.

Other possibility is check the priority of background tasks vs foreground tasks in the Windows advanced setup menus. right click my computer, click properties, click advanced, select performance button, clcik advanced, top area is where you give more priority to background tasks. I keep primary task optimized for gaming. If you want movies in background while working select background.

Last but not least. Did you get all the performance options turned back on after the clean install? That includes reloading the MB drivers for AGP, IDE, etc.

 

[Sazar]

You did not mention how capable your CPU, memory, HD etc. are.

The fact that the mpegs work indicates a bandwith issue (compressed mpegs use less bandwith to get to the decoder on the video card). A slow HD (fragmented, 5400 rpm etc. maybe an issue), a processor under 2 gig or with a 266 FSB or slow RAM will cause a bottle neck. Maybe (wag) the size of the AGP aperature set in the bios could affetc it. Virus scan or background defrag set on will steal bandwidth.

Other possibility is check the priority of background tasks vs foreground tasks in the Windows advanced setup menus. right click my computer, click properties, click advanced, select performance button, clcik advanced, top area is where you give more priority to background tasks. I keep primary task optimized for gaming. If you want movies in background while working select background.

Last but not least. Did you get all the performance options turned back on after the clean install? That includes reloading the MB drivers for AGP, IDE, etc.

most of the information is in his link 🙂

the little report he posted has driver info/cpu and other info...

 

[LordOfLA]

I use media player classic that comes with quicktime alternative and real alternative, I could try using bsplayer that comes with klcodecs and see if there is any difference.

just for the record cpu is athlon 2600 barton, ram is 512meg crucial ddr 400, mobo is asus a7n8xe-deluxe, hdd that the videos are on is a seagate baracuda 120gb 7200rpm 8mb cache, extra info is in the dxdiag report.

I doubt its hardware issue, a celeron 1.7 with pc133 ram could playback on two screens at the same time without slowing down. The difference being I knew what I was doing with nvidia stuff, I dont with ati stuff.

I'll post later with my results from testing bsplayer..

Mark

 

[LordOfLA]

okay well I've just been scrwing around with bsplayer and various videos on my second screen and its played every single video at full speed without wiping out my cpu power or skipping frames, which leads me to belive its an issue with media player classic.

So it seems my immediate problem is solved though I'll keep investigating why mpc has an issue.

Thanks for steering me in the right direction Sazar 🙂

Mark

 

[Sazar]

np m8... I think you had it figured out anyways 🙂