[mythtv-users] AMD guide to building a Media PC
Yan Seiner
yan at seiner.com
Sat Mar 3 16:05:40 UTC 2007
Brian Wood napsal(a):
> On Mar 3, 2007, at 7:52 AM, Yan Seiner wrote:
>
>
>> Which video card do you have?
>>
>> I have a Sempron 3000, which should be enough, and my TV runs at 720p,
>> so I guess I should be able to show HD. But it fails miserably with
>> prebuffering pauses and the CPU is pegged > 98%, so something is
>> wrong.
>>
>> I have another system with an Athlon XP 2000+, which shows HD content
>> just fine at 800x600 on TV out with 65% CPU.
>>
>> The big difference between the two machines is that the Sempron has an
>> nVidia 6200 whereas the Athlon has an nVidia 5200... ISTR reading
>> that
>> the 5200 is actually better at HD playback? Can anyone confirm that?
>>
>
> You say the "big difference" but I'll bet there are others. What
> driver versions? What settings (vsync or not etc.)? What options in
> your X configuration file? What buss is the card on and what
> parameters (fast writes etc.)?
>
I've been matching the two as closely as possible, to try and get a
handle on this.
Both use nVidia 9746 driver, both xorg files are as close as I can get
them, and both machines are a current install of Debian Etch, with
self-compiled myth-0.20-fixes.
One minor difference is that the source for the XP was built with
--march=athlon-xp, whereas the sempron defaulted to pentiumpro. I am
rebuilding now with --march=athlon; we'll see if that makes any difference.
Not sure about vsync; what do I need to look for there?
> The biggest difference I'm aware of between the 5xxx and the 6xxx
> cards is that the 5xxx ones use chroma key while the 6xxx uses
> overlay, but I'm sure there are other differences. I think this shows
> up more in things like the OSD and not so much in actual video
> playback where you're not keying or overlaying as a rule.
>
> Then there's the difference between a Sempron and an Athlon, major
> differences which might well show up in multimedia apps like HD
> decoding. Even the cache difference might be significant. A Sempron
> is a low-end CPU and I really wouldn't expect too much from it.
>
I suspect that may be the root cause; there were a variety of Semprons,
and some of the lower numbered Semprons had much bigger caches than
others. Mine is one of the low-low-end, 128K cache ones...
> It's been said that a "modern" AMD processor of the "3000+" rating
> should be able to do HD but I'm not sure I'd consider a Sempron as
> "modern" these days, but I'd still look at your video driver and X
> config settings.
>
I've been looking... Been through the wiki, xorg.conf, etc. The only
difference I picked up on just now is that the Athlon had nvagp set to 3
and the Sempron had it set to 1....
I'll see if that makes any difference.
I've also tweaked the nfs server settings per the wiki. We'll see when
I get a chance to reboot. (It's saturday AM, and the kids are getting
their fill of shlock-o-vision. Before long they'll be out riding bikes
and stuff and I'll do more testing....)
> Although AMD denies it, their model numbers really are, or at least
> were, intended to indicate performance relative to a P4 of the same
> vintage, since people were simply comparing clock speeds and Intel
> was obviously coming out ahead.
>
The whole Athlon numbering scheme is an exercise in marketing
silliness......
--Yan
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