[mythtv-users] Memory performance on Nvidia ION

[Jarod Wilson]

On Feb 22, 2011, at 7:46 PM, Paul Bender wrote:

> On 2/22/2011 4:08 PM, Mark wrote:
>> Hi jya,
>>> 
>>>  All i know is that one stick was not sufficient to not cause issues and
>>>  stuttering at times and i couldnt use tvdpau normal profile. Adding a
>>>  secong
>>>  helped but upping the memory bsticks to the max recommended for the zotac
>>>  ion a board and putting two of them in there helped a lot with visual
>>>  quality.
>>> 
>>>  As the other poster said. Suggest buying a matched stick, or swapping your
>>>  single stick for dual 1gb sticks... and trying and do please report back
>>>  here.
>>> 
>> 
>> I think the drivers have a LOT to do with this.  I recently updated my
>> Zotac ION frontend from an older Mythbuntu installation with Nvidia 175
>> series drivers to debian squeeze with Nvidia 260 driver and had a LOT of
>> video buffer issues, enough that caused it to start stuttering and causing
>> an echo effect over time.  It played PERFECT with vdpau before i used the
>> new install.  Last night I updated to 270 beta drivers and it helped a
>> little, but still not perfect.  And I've ALWAYS had 2 x 1MB sticks in the
>> thing.  The ONLY thing that changed on that Zotac was the software
>> installed.
> 
> From feedback that I have received on the MiniMyth forum, NVIDIA's 
> binary drivers, other run time software (especially Xorg and Linux), 
> compile time software (especially gcc and binutils) and compile time 
> options (especially optimizations (including link time optimizations)) 
> can all impact the performance of ION systems using the NVIDIA's binary 
> drivers. As a result, I have found it challenging to bisect performance 
> problems with the MiniMyth distribution when multiple packages (not to 
> mention the MiniMyth version) have be updated.
> 
> Personally, I do not have a problem with the NVIDIA 260.19.36 driver on 
> my ION platform (containing 2GB of memory with 0.5GB dedicated to video) 
> (and running software targeted (and tuned) for pentium-mmx with gcc's 
> -Os optimization and some link time optimization). However, I have the 
> advantage of being able to back out any changes that have caused me 
> problems.

No problems here with all three ion systems I have (two asrock ion 330's
and a zotac board build-your-own) running 260.19.36 atop either Fedora
or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, each with 2GB (2x1GB) of RAM with 512MB
given to video. Haven't done any atom-specific tuning or optimizing at
all though. Had a fair number of issues with 260.19.[something < 36] on
one of the asrock boxes running RHEL6 though.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com