PowerDVD 7 & Radeon 9800... horrible performance

[Zaphod_B]

Hi all... only my second post here. Technically this could be either a hardware or software issue, so sorry if it's in the wrong place.

I just reformatted my older PC, the one I watch DVDs on.

I'm running Windows XP SP2, on an Athlon 64 3200+ (2GHz), with 1GB RAM, an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb graphics card, and a 120GB hard drive. Obviously, not an incredibly amount of computing power. But it ran Cyberlink PowerDVD 5 with Hardware Acceleration just fine.

With my freshly formatted PC, I decided to install PowerDVD 7 Ultra, which I bought as an upgrade since I'm planning to get a new system including a Blu-Ray drive, and figured a new version of PowerDVD might also give better playback quality and control on my existing system.

Instead of better quality, when I run PowerDVD 7 with hardware acceleration it's virtually unwatchable... slow and jumpy, sometimes seeming to run about 3fps or even slower. Each frame looks nice enough, but it refuses to run smoothly like... well, like a DVD player should.

Of course, I can turn off hardware acceleration... now it runs ok, and looks ok (but only ok)... but then not only am I not getting the best out of the expensive software, but also I'm getting worse performance than if I ran PowerDVD 5 with hardware acceleration (which worked fine).

In PowerDVD 7, hardware acceleration is apparently powered by "ATI Avivo". It never said this in PowerDVD 5, but since my graphics card is an ATI one I assumed it would work ok... apparently not. ATI's Catalyst control centre (which comes with the card's drivers) have no options for Avivo, and PowerDVD has no advanced options for hardware acceleration for me to play with, so I can't work out where the problem is.

Now to state the obvious again: I realise my hardware is less than impressive. Presumably PowerDVD 7 expects more of hardware than PowerDVD 5 did... but surely 7 should be able to "scale" the acceleration in line with what the hardware is capable of? Or not?

Any thoughts or advice on this would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

[Ronin-7]

AVIVO which is ATI's branding for it's GPU video tech appeared first in the ATI X1000 series then the HD 2000 and current HD 3000 series.

ATI GPU's from prior generations do not have AVIVO though they may have some of the functionality.

My best guess is it's probably a driver issue if you are still using the old drivers that came with the card, uninstall them and the get the latest Catalyst 8.3 from this link (http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp) and see if that fixes the problem.

[Zaphod_B]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I did try uninstalling the Catalyst drivers and reinstalling them with the latest ones, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. Except one... the first time I tried to play a DVD with hardware acceleration after reinstalling drivers, it was running horribly slow as before (sound plays as normal, while video runs inconsistently but mostly in single-figure fps, totally unwatchable)... same as before I thought... but then I clicked a little further along on PowerDVD's navigational slider in order to try a later part of the movie. As soon as I did this, I got the infamous "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" Blue Screen Of Death! This has never happened before in previous versions of PowerDVD or any other media software... I have no reason to believe my RAM, CPU, HDD or DVD drive are faulty, and I very much doubt the processor was overheating. It just seems like PowerDVD with hardware acceleration puts waaaaay too much stress on the system, and now crashes it too...

Regular Avis, Mpegs etc all play fine, as do DVDs so long as I don't try to use 'hardware acceleration'... only when I do that it all goes wrong. Very odd...

[Ronin-7]

Yeah the BSOD sounds like it is a driver bug there were comments on other forums a while back that AGP cards had some issues with the latest drivers but I thought they were fixed in the Cat 8.3 release.

All I can suggest is that you file a bug with AMD/ATI (http://support.ati.com/ics/survey/survey.asp?deptID=894&surveyID=486&type=web) and hopefully a future release will have the problem sorted.

It's been a while since I used Cyberlink PowerDVD but don't they have their own software post processing mechanism it was called eagle vision at one point I think. You could try giving that a go instead of trying to get the GPU to do some of the work (it may even be better as ATI only started to take the video processing more seriously when it introduced AVIVO)

Or find any X1300 or X1600 ATI AGP card (should be real cheap by now) and swap out the 9800 for one of those and see if the hardware acceleration kicks into action.

[Zaphod_B]

Thanks for the advice. The software post-processing, called CLEV now, works but goes way overboard with colours - everything looks like it was shot in Fuji Velvia; orange faces etc.

Most of this system is at least four years old and showing its age in many ways, so I don't think I'll bother upgrading parts, since I'll probably replace the whole thing before long.

But I have found a kind of solution... not exactly a solution but a substitute. Having spent rather a lot on dedicated DVD-playing software, I found a free alternative that works as well (possibly better) with no problems... one that I would never have thought of using before... Windows Media Player. I think I have the ffdshow codec set up properly, because now DVDs in WMP look at least as good as they did in the older version of PowerDVD with hardware acceleration... and although WMP has nowhere near as many options, the colours "out the box" in WMP look better than with any of PowerDVD's various settings!

The interface isn't so good but the quality is, and that's most important for me... guess I'll stick with WMP for now and hope PowerDVD justifies its price when I try it with a new Blu-Ray system.