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#1 2012-09-19 09:56:31

MisterAnderson
Member
Registered: 2011-09-04
Posts: 285

Radeon X300 Stuttering playback at fullscreen, asking too much? [YES!]

Hey, I've got an old Radeon X300 (had it since new!) in my media server to run the two monitors I have hooked up. Problem is it's stuttering playback (and video lagging behind audio) when video windows are fullscreen or close to maximised.

I will admit, I'm running a 24" (1920x1200) and a 20" (1680x1050) monitor off this card and I'm guessing I'm just overloading it now. Before it had the 20" plus a 17" (1280x1024) and was going ok.

Running xf86-video-ati. What do you think? Is this card just outta juice or is there something I can do to get enough performance out of it? Mplayer settings maybe? (Using SMPlayer)

Last edited by MisterAnderson (2012-10-30 05:27:54)


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#2 2012-09-19 14:44:52

Darksoul71
Member
Registered: 2010-04-12
Posts: 319

Re: Radeon X300 Stuttering playback at fullscreen, asking too much? [YES!]

You should verify what program has the maximum CPU load under top. If Xorg shows an increase when you scale up videos this pretty much sounds to me as hardware acceleration for X is not playing nicely. I just set up an Manjaro based system with a X300 some days ago and didn't see any issue. I have switched to a GF 8600GT and Trisquel. So I can not (re)test again.

Edit: You should also check out dmesg and Xorg.0.log for any anomalities.

Last edited by Darksoul71 (2012-09-19 15:04:07)


My archlinux x86_64 host:
AMD E350 (2x1.6GHz) / 8GB DDR3 RAM / GeForce 9500GT (passive) / Arch running from 16GB USB Stick

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#3 2012-09-21 14:18:26

MisterAnderson
Member
Registered: 2011-09-04
Posts: 285

Re: Radeon X300 Stuttering playback at fullscreen, asking too much? [YES!]

I'm not totally sure as X usage jumps around a little but it does seem to increase slightly. When starting the video it goes from ~8% to ~18% with the windows small (about a quarter of the 1920x1200 screen) and goes up to mid 20's when fullscreen. This is with a 720p video running.

I've tried changing video output driver from xv to something like xv (0 - ati) which made no difference.

Checking Xorg.0.log I can see this

[greg@spacebar log]$ cat Xorg.0.log | grep -i accelerat
[    19.201] (II) RADEON(0): Render acceleration enabled for R300/R400/R500 type cards.
[    19.201] (II)         Composite (RENDER acceleration)
[    19.208] (II) RADEON(0): Acceleration enabled

and in dmesg

[greg@spacebar log]$ dmesg | grep -i radeon
[    0.635401] [drm] radeon defaulting to kernel modesetting.
[    0.635406] [drm] radeon kernel modesetting enabled.
[    0.635541] fb: conflicting fb hw usage radeondrmfb vs VESA VGA - removing generic driver
[    0.636939] radeon 0000:02:00.0: VRAM: 128M 0x00000000F0000000 - 0x00000000F7FFFFFF (128M used)
[    0.636942] radeon 0000:02:00.0: GTT: 512M 0x00000000D0000000 - 0x00000000EFFFFFFF
[    0.636987] radeon 0000:02:00.0: irq 42 for MSI/MSI-X
[    0.636998] radeon 0000:02:00.0: radeon: using MSI.
[    0.637020] [drm] radeon: irq initialized.
[    0.637517] [drm] radeon: 128M of VRAM memory ready
[    0.637519] [drm] radeon: 512M of GTT memory ready.
[    0.639619] [drm] radeon: 1 quad pipes, 1 Z pipes initialized.
[    0.640758] radeon 0000:02:00.0: WB enabled
[    0.640762] radeon 0000:02:00.0: fence driver on ring 0 use gpu addr 0x00000000d0000000 and cpu addr 0xffff88010fca4000
[    0.641626] [drm] radeon: ring at 0x00000000D0001000
[    0.642048] [drm] Radeon Display Connectors
[    0.863592] fb0: radeondrmfb frame buffer device
[    0.863599] [drm] Initialized radeon 2.18.0 20080528 for 0000:02:00.0 on minor 0

so I'd say acceleration is at least turned on. I've been thinking about replacing this with the cheapest eyefinity card I can find for a while so I can get 3 displays, but with the larger screen I was feeling like that was no longer needed. Ironically it's looking like I might need to anyway. (I'm looking at the displayport radeon HD 5450's as I can't find anything cheaper)


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#4 2012-10-02 12:55:21

MisterAnderson
Member
Registered: 2011-09-04
Posts: 285

Re: Radeon X300 Stuttering playback at fullscreen, asking too much? [YES!]

I've decided that it can't handle the large resolution, as turning one monitor off produces smooth playback.


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#5 2012-10-25 04:49:02

MisterAnderson
Member
Registered: 2011-09-04
Posts: 285

Re: Radeon X300 Stuttering playback at fullscreen, asking too much? [YES!]

If anyone is still interested, I've improved the situation a little by installing the linux-ck kernel (ck-kx group from repo-ck, minus nvidia) which to my surprise increased performance enough to *just* play videos in a maximised smplayer window on the 22" (fullscreen is still too much). Don't know why it's made a difference. The computer also has an amd athlon 64 3600+ X2, 4GB ram and several hdd's.


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#6 2012-10-30 05:24:18

MisterAnderson
Member
Registered: 2011-09-04
Posts: 285

Re: Radeon X300 Stuttering playback at fullscreen, asking too much? [YES!]

Definitely the gfx struggling, comp now has a new motherboard with an amd phenom x4 9950 BE and 4GB ram, same problem. Looks like a new gfx card is now in the plans.


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