8200 (IGP) based motherboards not suitable for VDPAU?

[mulder77]

Hi,

I have the following setup:

- Asus M3N78-VM
- Athlon X2 5050e
- 2x1 GB DDR2-800 RAM

I tested several possibilities, including Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04RC.
I tried drivers from 180.44 to 185.19. Both packaged with Ubuntu as well as compiled it myself.

I tried both current XBMC SVN and latest mplayer-vdpau but I am not able to play 720p/1080p properly. As reference I try to play Big Buck Bunny movie (http://www.bigbuckbunny.org) in h264/1080p.

I usually get around 12-15 fps. CPU usage is very low (<10%).

Before I will create log information etc. I would like to know if this combination of HW/SW is known to work correctly regarding VDPAU or if I can giveup this setup.

Thanks
Markus

[apaige]

Originally Posted by mulder77

I would like to know if this combination of HW/SW is known to work correctly regarding VDPAU

Yes.

[mulder77]

Originally Posted by apaige

Yes.

OK, thanks.
So what shall I check first to track down the problem I obviously must have when my setup doesn't play fine?


Thanks
Markus

[Dragoran]

Originally Posted by mulder77

OK, thanks.
So what shall I check first to track down the problem I obviously must have when my setup doesn't play fine?


Thanks
Markus

Does it work if you start glxgears while playing the videos ?

[mulder77]

Originally Posted by Dragoran

Does it work if you start glxgears while playing the videos ?

Great!
While running glxgears, video playback is smooth at the framerate it should be.

So some kind of power saving I think.
How do I manage this with the driver?


Thanks!
Markus

[Dragoran]

Originally Posted by mulder77

Great!
While running glxgears, video playback is smooth at the framerate it should be.

So some kind of power saving I think.
How do I manage this with the driver?


Thanks!
Markus

VDPAU seems not to let the driver change the performance level like opengl does.
You can force the card to run at a higher performance level by adding

options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PerfLevelSrc=0x2222"

To /etc/modprobe.conf and reboot.

But the fact that it does not change the performance level when required is a driver bug that should be fixed.

[primerib]

Originally Posted by Dragoran

VDPAU seems not to let the driver change the performance level like opengl does.
You can force the card to run at a higher performance level by adding


To /etc/modprobe.conf and reboot.

But the fact that it does not change the performance level when required is a driver bug that should be fixed.

Do you mean maybe /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf or something? I use Debian and there is no modprobe.conf anywhere.

[Dragoran]

Originally Posted by primerib

Do you mean maybe /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf or something? I use Debian and there is no modprobe.conf anywhere.

Yes should be fine too.

[mulder77]

Originally Posted by Dragoran

VDPAU seems not to let the driver change the performance level like opengl does.
You can force the card to run at a higher performance level by adding


To /etc/modprobe.conf and reboot.

But the fact that it does not change the performance level when required is a driver bug that should be fixed.

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the real problem.
I played around a bit and tried to set the 8200 to the performance mode by adding similar options to the xorg.conf as you suggested.

But both, adding options to xorg.conf or to modprobe.conf didn't help.

I noticed that glxgears uses up to 100% cputime (around 1700 fps).
glxinfo states that direct rendering is available.

So, I tested the following situations:

- glxgears running, CPU @2600 MHz:
Video playback is totally smooth, no framedrops

- glxgears running, CPU @1000 MHz:
Video playback at 16 fps, framedrops

- no glxgears, CPU @2600 MHz:
Video playback nearly smooth, very few problems

- no glxgears, CPU @1000 MHz:
Video playback at 16 fps, framedrops

Well, I think, the problems occur due to timing problems.
When playing back some HD files, cpu usage of XBMC never is higher than roughly 10%. So VDPAU is doing it's job...


Any hint is very welcome!
Markus

[pcjason]

Do you have powernowd installed? I believe that is responsible for CPU scaling, and caused the same issues on my 8200 based setup. I would need to double check, but I believe the CPU scaling works by lowering the bus speed, not by changing the clock multiplier, which leads to less bandwidth for the GPU.

Try removing powernowd and see if it helps.

[hl_]

That's wrong. CPU frequency scaling switches between multipliers, at least on all current Intel and AMD CPUs.

[mulder77]

I played around a bit, currently I have the following setup.

Instead of glxgears, I run burnK7.
Same result, video is smooth.

It stays smooth when lowering the cpu clock manually down to 1.8GHz.
When set to the lowest frequency, 1 GHz, and still running burnK7, video is not played back smoothly.

But I need to create some real cpu usage. Just fixing the frequency to 2.6 GHz doesn't help too much, it's still not smooth then.


Markus