nvidia 7050

[colinjones]

Cirion/Totallymaxed/Fibres

That's what has stumped me - FYI, I have not tried b2 on this particular board, only b3 and have reinstalled completely 9 times for various reasons. Everytime, the video is exactly the same. Using 64bit DVD and have tried CDs once as well.

Cirion - this is the exact board I have got, plus 2GB RAM and Athlon 5200+. And the Nova T 500 card that Totallymaxed recommended - but that can't be relevant anyway, because its not just TV, its all video. What BIOS version are you using? Have you upgraded the BIOS?

All - are you saying that if, for instance, on a TV station there is a pan at a reasonable speed, that it is completely smooth without any jerking? Another very obvious symptom is when watching morning TV, where they often have a news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen, this is constantly jerky...

Has anybody used any specific configuration in the drivers (options) or xorg.conf file or any other configuration that might have helped? BTW - yes I am setting the BIOS's video/system memory apperture to the max, 256MB (which is in fact the default anyway!)

[Zaerc]

Tried running "top" in a terminal to see if there are processes using up all the CPU or memory?

[colinjones]

Sorry, I didn't mention that in this thread (detailed it in my many other posts on this subject )

My CPU is not high - often averaging less than 20%. BTW - its a dual core, can I assume that CPU % should add up to 200%? As I have seen it well over 100% on occasion... effectively meaning that 100% is 50% of the entire box?

Haven't looked at memory to be honest.... looking right now. Sorting on MEM%

mysql - 5%
photo_screen_saver - 4.9%
OrbiterGL - 4.6%
Xine_player - 2.4%
Proxy Orbiter - 2.0%
DCERouter - 1.6%
xorg - 1.5%
plutovdr - 1.3%
and a handful of others around the 1% mark. This on a 2GB system - Mem comes up as around 1.8GB and swap about 1.8GB... would have been easier just to cut and paste! Here you go...

top - 14:08:41 up  2:46,  1 user,  load average: 0.70, 1.31, 1.39
Tasks: 212 total,   3 running, 209 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 16.9%us,  3.6%sy,  0.2%ni, 78.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.7%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1804060k total,  1770260k used,    33800k free,    88324k buffers
Swap:  1959888k total,        0k used,  1959888k free,   977936k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
18332 root      15   0  300m  23m  13m R   22  1.3  33:41.05 plutovdr
11720 root      14  -1  105m  25m  16m S    6  1.5   9:40.53 Xorg
 8471 vdr       15   0  194m 9136 2520 S    1  0.5   2:30.77 vdr
10341 root      25   0  9272 1576 1080 S    1  0.1   0:44.21 StorageDevices_
11019 linuxmce  15   0 19084 1408  968 R    0  0.1   0:00.61 top
    1 root      20   0  3964  840  572 S    0  0.0   0:01.44 init
    2 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.21 migration/0
    4 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
    6 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.27 migration/1
    7 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/1
    8 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/1
    9 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 events/0
   10 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 events/1
   11 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 khelper
   30 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kblockd/0

[cirion]

I'm using 1GB ram and a AMD Athlon 64x2 4400+ on my board. UI2 with Alpha Blending has a lot of tearing and is not smooth at all.
But UI2 with overlay works great on this board. Video is smooth.

I am not using any TV card at the moment. I am waiting for a improved VDR version to be released.
And I have not been able to compile a plugin I need.

[1audio]

Colin:
Here are a few other things to check-
1) Bios  is it current?
2) Video settings in the bios- how much video memory have you set for the video system (on-board video) it should be 128 MB for HD. A separate card does not have this issue. But the video window should be set to 128 MB in the bios.
3) Memory should be 1 GB in the core and 512 MB in a  media director. more isn't used and less will cause problems like you mentioned.
Both of these seemingly obvious issues are often overlooked and can make a big difference. And the OS can't over-ride them it seems. I have been bit by both several times.

[colinjones]

Thx 1audio...
No I haven't upgraded my BIOS yet as I have read that the latest couple introduce a particular bug. So I was asking (above) cirion what version BIOS he is on. If it was the same as mine then that probably isn't the cause. I think he missed that question.

For 2 and 3, as I mentioned above my video memory aperture is set to 256MB which is the highest it will go and the default for this BIOS anyway. System memory for the core is 2GB.

[totallymaxed]

Totallymaxed - any suggestions then why I am getting such poor video performance? In all sources (TV(Nova T 500), video files (hundreds of the, all different kinds, low and high bitrates), DVDs, etc)

The video is very jerky and low frame rate even on real time sources like DVB. Pans are unwatchable! Sometimes as low as 5-10 frames per second. I have rebuilt so many times, and no difference.

Sorry Colin... I can't understand why you see such poor video performance. We just do not see that here at all. All I can assume is that there is some variable in your setup that we are missing that causing your system to under-perform... what that this though is not apparent to me!

[cirion]

Sorry but I'm not able to se my bios version. I can not see that screen on my TV. I press TAB and se it for a fraction of a second
But I tried looking for a updated bios for my board when I first installed it, since I could not get it to boot on LAN.
I did not find any bios upgrade for this board.

In the end I just erased CMOS and entered bios and loaded the optimized defaults and enabled boot on LAN. This time it worked.
I see that my iGPU Frame is set to Auto (64MB) I have now set it to 256mb and will try to see if there is any difference.

I have 2 of these boards, and both required a cmos reset before they where able to boot on LAN.

[cirion]

I don't see any difference when the iGPU was set to manual and 256MB...

Is there any way to see my bios version in Kubuntu?

[colinjones]

I assume there is, but I think one of the Linux dudes will have to advise - probably mentioned in a log file somewhere. Certainly the VideoBIOS version is mentioned in Xorg.0.log - someone told me that the system BIOS upgrades also upgrade the VideoBIOS... does that sound right?

BTW - did you notice if the manual that comes with that board seems to indicate the wrong CMOS-clear setting for the jumper? All my other jumpers seem to be illustrated correctly in the manual, but the CMOS one seems to be the wrong way around. Took me ages to work out that's why the board wouldn't power up!

[Zaerc]

Well if that's about average for your system (the "top" data) when this is occuring we can rule out your CPU and memory as the bottlenecks, that's for sure.

[colinjones]

Well if that's about average for your system (the "top" data) when this is occuring we can rule out your CPU and memory as the bottlenecks, that's for sure.

I suspected so, thanks for your help Zaerc.

[royw]

lshw should show your bios version.  Be sure to run it with root access.  For example:

linuxmce@dcerouter:~$ sudo lshw
[sudo] password for linuxmce:
dcerouter
    description: Desktop Computer
    product: GA-MA69G-S3H
    vendor: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
    width: 32 bits
    capabilities: smbios-2.4 dmi-2.4
    configuration: boot=normal chassis=desktop uuid=30303141-3444-3431-3846-4346FFFFFFFF
  *-core
       description: Motherboard
       product: GA-MA69G-S3H
       vendor: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
       physical id: 0
     *-firmware
          description: BIOS
          vendor: Award Software International, Inc.
          physical id: 0
          version: F5 (11/30/2007)

HTH,
Roy