HD 4850 running @ 4x speeds bottleneck? or not?

[misho]

OK guys. so I have the motherboard ASRock 4coredual-sata2. It has a 16x pcie slot which only runs at 4x speeds.
I also have a ATI HD4850. Is the 4x speed going to slow down the video card? FPS wise in games and 1080p movies?


Weird thing is, when I play 720p and 1080p movies, they all stutter a lot, and CPU usage goes to aabout %70. (my cpu is E7400 @ stock). using VLC without any additional codecs. I also tried coreavc, but exact same stutter.

In CoD5 @ 1900x1200 everything at max, i get around 30-40FPS, and it seems playable. Is it worth to spend $50 on a Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L, which has 16x speeds, and can OC the cpu as well?

[tiro_uspsss]

the PCIEx4 will be fine for 1080P
for FPS... while ATi cards arent as sensitive as NV cards with reduced PCIE lanes, x4 is pushing ur luck, u will take a hit - tho u said urself ur getting playable fps still..
but if u have the $50 spare for the mobo u mentioned, i'd highly recommend getting it :up:

[XCheater]

if you're running ati stream apps, then 4x is killing the performance
i mean the difference of sending data to gpu much much slower than you ever think

[misho]

Hey guys.
Can anyone find me reviews of 4850 playing on CoD5 @ 1900x1200? googled around and didn't find much. I just wanna compare that, to the FPS that I get with it running at 4x
Thanks

Also anyone know why its soo choppy when playing movies? very weird.
Edit::
http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image//skymtl/GPU/GIGABYTE-HD4850/GIGABYTE-HD4850-56.JPG
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video/gainward-hd4850-1024mb-gs/codww.png
http://media.bestofmicro.com/9/N/181787/original/image009.png

OK it seems to me that I am in the range for my FPS :| (dont forget these were tested on faster systems)

Still gotta figure out why so much stutter in the movies :( any help?
Thanks

[Particle]

Is the 4x speed going to slow down the video card?

...

Weird thing is, when I play 720p and 1080p movies, they all stutter a lot, and CPU usage goes to aabout %70. (my cpu is E7400 @ stock). using VLC without any additional codecs. I also tried coreavc, but exact same stutter.


Still gotta figure out why so much stutter in the movies :( any help?
Thanks

PCIe 2.0 @ x4 isn't going to be a significant obstacle for your card. It has plenty of bandwidth. I wouldn't worry unless I had to run at *lower than* x2 or x4 (if PCIe 1.0).

As for your video playback, it's your CPU. VLC uses only its own software codecs, so you're receiving neither the benefit from GPU-accelerated decoding nor CoreAVC. Try playing back your movie in a Direct Show based player if you want to use CoreAVC's decoder. This could be anything even as simple as Windows Media Player. You can also use PowerDVD or struggle with Media Player Classic Home Cinema if you'd rather get GPU decoding going.

[misho]

PCIe 2.0 @ x4 isn't going to be a significant obstacle for your card. It has plenty of bandwidth. I wouldn't worry unless I had to run at *lower than* x2 or x4 (if PCIe 1.0).

As for your video playback, it's your CPU. VLC uses only its own software codecs, so you're receiving neither the benefit from GPU-accelerated decoding nor CoreAVC. Try playing back your movie in a Direct Show based player if you want to use CoreAVC's decoder. This could be anything even as simple as Windows Media Player. You can also use PowerDVD or struggle with Media Player Classic Home Cinema if you'd rather get GPU decoding going.

Hey, can you recommend me a direct show based player? Thanks

I can't believe a E7400 is a bottleneck for a 1080p movie :( I've see ppl with HTPC and lower end CPUs running 1080p fine.

[Frodin]

As already mentioned, it does not seem like PCI-E 4x causes much of a bottleneck for a video card, at least according to TEchpowerup (http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/). They are using a 5870 for testing, which in theory should be even more prone to bottlenecking.
As for your video stutter, it seems really strange. An E7400 should be more than adequate for playing back HD video (unless the bitrate is out of this wolrd, of course), even without GPU- acceleration.
For software players, check out Media Player Classic Home Cinema (http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/index.html).

[Particle]

It's not that surprising. H.264 decoders are rarely multithreaded, and full HD content can often require a C2 or PhII CPU to run in excess of 3GHz to be perfectly smooth. Now, if you get a proper multithreaded decoder (latest builds of ffdshow or CoreAVC), have it configured right, and use a Direct Show based player your problem will vanish.

I've seen movie playback swamp three cores before at the high points when at 2.2GHz.

[misho]

It's not that surprising. H.264 decoders are rarely multithreaded, and full HD content can often require a C2 or PhII CPU to run in excess of 3GHz to be perfectly smooth. Now, if you get a proper multithreaded decoder (latest builds of ffdshow or CoreAVC), have it configured right, and use a Direct Show based player your problem will vanish.

I've seen movie playback swamp three cores before at the high points when at 2.2GHz.

Yeah I had a E8400 @ 4.3Ghz and I just installed VLC and was ready to watch 1080p etc no probs.

OK, im going to install ffdshow and try it.
Can you recommend me a good direct show based player?? Plz
thnx

[zanzabar]

Yeah I had a E8400 @ 4.3Ghz and I just installed VLC and was ready to watch 1080p etc no probs.

OK, im going to install ffdshow and try it.
Can you recommend me a good direct show based player?? Plz
thnx

what ever WMP you have

[misho]

OK, so I ran the videos in WMP, and its perfect, like 15-20% cpu usage.
I installed ffdshow as well and same thing :D

BUT:: When I play 1080p HDDVD files its very weird, green blocks and red and blue all over the movie., Here is a screenie:

http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/3927/58243051.jpg
and (\/ that red line on top is done by me)
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/131/36406236.jpg

However, when I play blueray files, its perfect.

Weird :(. This happened on WMV before i installed FFDshow and after as well.

Didnt happen on VLC, but all movies were choppy

[Particle]

Try installing CoreAVC again, going to the ffdshow video decoder configuration utility, and setting H.264 to use coreavc as a decoder instead of libavcodec.

[misho]

:(, no go. I tried reinstalling twice, (completely removing coreAVC first,) but i still cannot choose the coreavc as the decoder for H.264/AVC.
The options are: disabled, libavcodec, ffmpeg-mt

Can't find coreavc

[misho]

I even tried the ffmpeg-mt codec, and still the same issue. can't get coreavc in the options :S