So, I installed the IBM signed Nvidia drivers… no joy though. The machine still struggles with video playback – which is seriously taking the piss. This is a Sempron 2800 processor powered machine. The TNT2 may be long in the tooth but it’s certainly capable of full screen video – and has been before. Hell, my K6-II could outperform this machine’s video at the moment. Anyone got any suggestions – is it XP unhappy with 64bittyness? Is it TNT2 doesn’t play well in a 64bit machine / or with XP on a 64 bit machine?
Help! I need my decent video playback back. And a performance hike’d be nice, this machine’s hella-slow quite a lot of the time. It’s got half a gig of ram, is that way too low (it’s more than the old one had and that outperformed this one by a substantial margain).
Suggestions on a comment to the usual address :-)
Well, Phil just built a 64-bit machine running Windows XP, and slow it certainly isn’t. XP doesn’t really care (it’s still running in 32-bit mode… unless you did something crazy like getting XP x64, which you didn’t, right?). The big difference though, is he has a GeForce graphics card (some PCI Express device).
512Mb of RAM is okay for XP, depending on how you tax it, but shouldn’t make a huge difference to video playback unless you’re making the machine swap to disk. Personally, I’d add more RAM anyway (just hit 1.5Gb on Win2K myself, though the 512Mb XP machines at work are “serviceable”).
Other suggestions:
Try dropping the colour depth to 16-bit.
Open Task Manager, turn on Options -> Hide When Minimised, then minimise it – you should get the little CPU meter in the system tray. Leave it there and see if something is spiking the CPU periodically. If it the little box goes entirely bright green, that’s bad.
If you’re getting generally crap performance though, I’m loath to blame the video card. Check that CPU meter! Also, in Task Manager (Performance tab), check the Commit Charge Total and Peak values. Ideally your total commit charge should be some way lower than the amount of RAM in your computer for best performance. As it rises, applications will be forced to swap to disk. Also, if the peak is vastly over the amount of RAM in the computer, sometime in the past you’ve probably been mean to it.
Well, the Commit Charge total is about 40Meg more than the amount of memory installed, The ‘peak’ suggests I’ve been mean to it (that’d be me running photoshop then). The machine’s performance isn’t bad generally; I know that it could do with memory, but even quitting everything and leaving it a while before playing video – as soon as you try to play video then you get about 80% processor usage – and full screen video maxes out the processor. I have no idea why.
I’ve just set it to run in 16bit (I think I tried that before) but since I’m currently burning a DVD I’ll wait until that’s done before testing the performance enhancement. I’ll feel like a right dozy cow if that’s it though :-)
Test results indicate mild improvement, but still not managing full screen video. Processor usage remains at 100% when playing back full screen video :(