bad graphics card? or just normal?

[QED]

Maybe this is a problem, maybe not-- I'm not sure. But I notice in Task Manager that my cpu usage goes through the roof when I scroll in Internet Explorer. For instance, if I load CNN.com, and grab the right scrollbar and shake it up and down, I can get my CPU usage to hit 100%. When I'm not doing anything, my CPU usage is normally in less than 10%.

Watching video of any kind (even crappy low-res Youtube videos) also seems to tax the CPU unneccesarily high. For instance, when watching the YouTube clip of Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" fullscreen, my cpu usage hits a fairly constant 80%. If I'm watching a video in one window and scrolling through a website in the other, the video becomes chop-chop-chop-suey.

My hardware should be beefy enough to not hog the CPU to walk a small little video-- I have an AMD 64 3000+ processor with 1GB RAM, and my video card is a Radeaon X800 Pro.

I remember nearly a decade ago this type of CPU usage when moving 2D windows or watching video was quite common for most video cards, but if i recall correctly, the advent of bus-mastering PCI video cards, DMA mode, and faster 2D video processors made this a thing of the past.

I've tried benchmarking my 2D performance with various freeware benchmarks, but they actually show pretty good performance. I've tried upgrading my graphics driver-- no change. Even moving from XP to a clean install of Vista hasn't made any improvements.

First of all-- is all of this normal? I mean, is it normal for CPU usage to spike when watching video (particularly full screen), or moving or scrolling through windows as much as mine seems to? And secondly, if this is not normal-- what are some things to try to get it working better?

 

[mechBgon]

Is your motherboard's chipset driver package installed? Sorry for the dumb question

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Its normal, my C2D hits almost 70 when scrolling the cnn homepage

 

[QED]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Is your motherboard's chipset driver package installed? Sorry for the dumb question

To paraphrase an old saying: "There are no dumb questions... only dumb people." j/k

Anyways, I had my chipset driver installed on XP. I just did a fresh install of Vista, so I have not installed the chipset driver yet (I'm not even sure if my motherboard chipset has a Vista driver--I'll have to check).

I was pretty sure the video playback performance was due to me having so many different codecs installed (I've had the same XP installation for 5 years, and during that time I installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled all sorts of various codes, video players, muxers, and editing packages). However, my fresh install of Vista has the same playback performance "issues" (if you consider high CPU usage during video playback an issue).

 

[jaqie]

flash video? then both are quite normal.