ATI 3650 1080p Playback

[akashi]

Hi,

I am having problems playing back 1080p videos properly with my video card. I am hoping someone can share any info on getting it to work.

My specs:
Abit IP35 Pro
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @3GHz
4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 RAM
ATI Radeon 3650 256MB

I was using a 720p monitor and was able to playback both 720p and 1080p (H.264) videos smoothly with MPC-HC with DXVA enabled.

I recently upgraded my monitor to a Dell U2711 2560x1440 and now cannot play 1080p videos smoothly except 720p videos. The videos play very slowly and sometimes would restart the computer after freezing. I sometimes get an error message saying the display driver crashed and was restarted.

I tried rendering in EVR, EVR Custom and MadVR and tried different DXVA codes such as MPC and LAV with DXVA enabled. 720p always plays perfectly and some 1080p videos play smoothly until I make it full screen (1440p)

I can play 1080p videos perfectly if I disable DXVA as the CPU is fast enough. I think my video card is not capable of up-scaling videos to 1440p.

I tried running DXVAChecker with both MPC and LAV codecs in DXVA and it plays my 1080p 30fps videos at over 70fps! But when I try playing it on MPC-HC I get roughly 15fps. I tried others players like PotPlayer and VLC with same results.

I hope someone can help me figure out the problem. I ordered a HD 6570 but returned it as it only supports Single-Link DVI which is not fast enough to support my monitor’s resolution.

Thanks in advance.

[QuickPlay]

Your video card is old, 2006–2007, my old pc has the same thing, try software decodering.

[akashi]

Your video card is old, 2006–2007, my old pc has the same thing, try software decodering.

Thanks for your input. I am doing this right now but I would like to be able to use DXVA so I can use my CPU to process my other tasks.

[Hera]

Update Drivers
Update DirectX
Update Windows Stuffs
Don't multi task when playing video
Try out JanWillem32's MPC-HC builds

[akashi]

Thanks Hera, I will try this when I return home from work.

[nevcairiel]

My first guess would be that your GPU does not have enough memory for DXVA and upscaling 1080p to 1440p - 256MB isn't all that much, and Windows already uses some of it for the Desktop.
Software decoding has the advantage that it doesn't use the GPUs memory for decoding, which also fits into my theory.

You can check the GPUs memory usage with a tool like GPU-Z.
If the memory really is the problem, you can try disabling Aero, it should release some of the memory that Windows used.

[akashi]

nevcairiel, you are absolutely right! Thank you very much for pointing this out to me! I checked the GPU memory usage with GPU-Z and it was very high when playing 1080p videos. I disabled Windows Aero and used the Windows Classic theme and most of the 1080p videos played smoothly even in full screen!

Some of the videos didn't play smoothly and the memory usage on the GPU was around 240-245MB, that's pretty much maxed out :(

Is there any trick into using my system memory to boost the GPU? Otherwise I need to search for a passive HD 6570 and these are hard to find in the UK.

Thanks again.

http://thumbnails61.imagebam.com/19966/a12068199652438.jpg (http://www.imagebam.com/image/a12068199652438)

[Hera]

Is that with JanWillem32's MPC-HC builds? If no, see if that fixes it.

If yes,
There are Mixer Buffers in Playback->Output but those may go to RAM and not VRAM (not sure). Try reducing those.
There is also Sub Pictures to Buffer in Subtitles setting. I think you can set those as low as zero. Might help.

[akashi]

Thank you for the suggestion Hera. Unfortunately it did not work so I am going to order a newer GPU.

Thanks to everyone on this thread for your support.