No HD video acceleration with 8800GT.

[elkinm]

I recently upgraded from an ATI 1900XT to an 8800GT. I know not much of an upgrade.

The 1900 was having stability issues and I had the 8800 lying around.

I removed the ATI drivers and installed the 8800GT. I noticed strait away that 2D was slow as I could see the drawing at boot before it went into windows.

With the latest drivers everything seemed fine until I tried playing some HD flash videos or standalone HD files. The video looks fine but is very slow and choppy, maybe a couple frames per second.

I am running XP Pro SP3. I can give the exact driver version later today.

I have not done an ATI to NVIDIA switch in a while and I am not up to speed on how to completely remove the ATI drivers. I searched online for both the driver uninstall and HD display issues without success.

Anybody know any good things to try and get everything to run normally?

Thanks,
elkinm

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

I recently upgraded from an ATI 1900XT to an 8800GT. I know not much of an upgrade.

The 1900 was having stability issues and I had the 8800 lying around.

I removed the ATI drivers and installed the 8800GT. I noticed strait away that 2D was slow as I could see the drawing at boot before it went into windows.

With the latest drivers everything seemed fine until I tried playing some HD flash videos or standalone HD files. The video looks fine but is very slow and choppy, maybe a couple frames per second.

I am running XP Pro SP3. I can give the exact driver version later today.

I have not done an ATI to NVIDIA switch in a while and I am not up to speed on how to completely remove the ATI drivers. I searched online for both the driver uninstall and HD display issues without success.

Anybody know any good things to try and get everything to run normally?

Thanks,
elkinm

Going from x1900XT -> 8800GT should be a sizable jump in performance.

Try uninstalling the drivers, run CCleaner (http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download), then reinstalling the drivers.

 

[PingviN]

What codec/media player are you using?

 

[elkinm]

I am using the Mega-Codec pack with MP Classic (not the latest version but less than a year old), however most video's are played using the latest version of VLC. All of them are equaly as bad with MPC sometimes being a little better. And as far as flash, I have the latest 10.1.82 or something with hardware acceleration enabled, but with ATI, I gained no performance going from 10.0 to 10.1 so I don't think any acceleration worked with the ATI card.

I did try changing the video setting on MPC to use DX9 and ect, without any benefits.

I will try CCleaner and maybe the new Nvidia installed with the clean install option.

I just can't believe that in this day and age I have generic display uses like I have not seen in over 6 years.

Thanks again.

 

[elkinm]

Also, with CCleaner, what should I remove? Invalid registry entries listing ATI?

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Also, with CCleaner, what should I remove? Invalid registry entries listing ATI?

I, personally, have never had an issue removing everything CCleaner recommends. That said, any time you monkey around with the registry, there is always potential for a FUBAR situation, resulting in a Windows re-install.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

What codec/media player are you using?

That fact that his 2D performance is poor - "2D was slow as I could see the drawing at boot before it went into windows" - indicates to me that the issue is not codec-related.

 

[elkinm]

That fact that his 2D performance is poor - "2D was slow as I could see the drawing at boot before it went into windows" - indicates to me that the issue is not codec-related.

I think this just shows that the native on-board 2D drawing of the 8800GT is horrible. This did greatly improve in windows with the proper drivers installed.

My guess is the video and 2D acceleration on the ATI card can work natively and it runs well even without the driver support. And I think this is not the case with NVIDIA and I need the right drivers installed and configured properly to work best.

 

[nenforcer]

Any video card is going to play Adobe Flash horribly without the latest 10.1 version which includes hardware acceleration. Are you sure you have the latest Adobe Flash installed?

 

[elkinm]

I tried a clean install of the 260 beta drivers. Unfortunately I do not see any improvements. I did run CCleaner which found an old ATI key which I removed.

I had no issues before with Flash 10.0 and saw no real improvement with 10.1.

Since I am seeing slow drawing at boot, are there any specific BIOS settings that are usually good for NVIDIA cards that I can try?

The card itself is a MSI NX8800GT-T2D512E-OC

Anybody know of any issues with this specific card?

 

[elkinm]

I had a lot of time over the weekend to work on this and I kind of fixed it. The final fix was simply moving my monitor output to the second DVI port. Something that I always though of trying, but never remembered to do.

Here is what I did before that:
First I updated my rivatuner hoping to see if hardware acceleration was enabled and possibly underclock and see if it helped.
Result: No information about acceleration and as after I enabled overclocking support (and possibly) the hardware and chipset compatibility mode, for some reason my desktop colors changed, they became brighter, but with less contrast, like gamma was shot up a lot.

Then I tried installing the new Mega Codec Pack with Media Player Classic Home Cinema (WMCHC) with a new HW accelerated X264 codec. Well, the good news is that the 1080p files that could not play before could play now, but everything else, Divix, xvid, mpeg and low end HD which played fine before became unwatchable.
I also noticed that if I loaded MPCHC when my colors where messed up I would get a system freeze and would need a hard reset.
However, if I used MP 6.4 of VLC is worked also, I could start MPCHC and play a file inside but not if I start a file with it.

I could sometimes reload the drivers with rivatuner and then I could launch MPCHC videos without problems other than the slowness.

Then I started BIOS tweaking (P5B-Deluxe), limiting PEG transfer speeds changing MB voltages, enabling the Plug n play OS option (off by default), changing the PCI latency timer. And eventually a BIOS reset and set these setting again. I did a restart after each change with no effect.

I undid the changes from rivatuner and uninstalled it, but my desktop colors were still messed up. It would boot normally, but shortly after the desktop shows up it would change.
With no rivatuner, the colors were still messed up but now I could not re-load the drivers.

I was ready to re-install the drivers and codecs when I remembered from previous experience, I have seen Nvidia cards have problems with the connectors so I tried the other connector I did that and what do you know, the screen was normal.
I switched back the other connector and I had problems again.

With the good connector, to my surprise all video acceleration worked fine. However, I could still freeze when starting MPCHC so I uninstalled it and put on the regular MPC which works fine so far.
However, drawing at the BIOS boot and in BIOS was still super slow with the good connector.

So in the end it seems that simply moving to a different connector fixed my problems.
Anybody have any suggestions or explanations regarding what exactly happened other that me having a bad card?

Thanks everyone.