Twitch.tv 720P60 stream viewing, with RX 570 4GB card, in Win7 64-bit. 85% CPU time used???

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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Trying to figure this out. I have a friend with an older rig, an Athlon II X4 CPU, 4x4GB DDR2 RAM, and as of last week or so, a new RX 570 4GB card.

I helped him load the newest 19.4.1 Adrenaline drivers in Win7 64-bit.

He also uses Firefox for browsing, and has the newest Flash Player installed.

Hardware acceleration in Firefox prefs is enabled, Content Process limit set to 4 (number of CPU cores).

Not sure why he's seeing such high CPU usage.

Even lowly Brazos could watch 1080P H.264 YouTube when it came out, in Win7 64-bit, with lower CPU usage. Maybe only 30P, not 60P.

So, is this indication that the OS and browser and video driver are not all communicating to hardware-accelerate playback of Twitch streams? What am I missing here?

I told him that I would hook him up with another, larger, SSD, and we could install Windows 10 on that, and see if things worked better. His Win7 64-bit OS installation is a few years old, and has probably had Codec packs, DivX Player/Codecs, as well as VLC, and various NVidia and AMD video drivers installed and un-installed over the years.
 

DAPUNISHER

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member
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I like your idea: Unhook his drive, and do a fresh setup with one of your's. If it resolves the issue, you have your answer. If it doesn't, I'd try a different card, preferably Nvidia, to eliminate the AMD drivers from the mix.
 

Stuka87

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Dec 10, 2010
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Make sure hardware acceleration is enabled int he browser. It typically is by default, but worth double checking. May also be worth trying out Chrome to see if it works any different.
 

Spjut

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Apr 9, 2011
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Hopefully you've found a solution by now, but it seems like more sites have started forcing VP9 decoding unless you're using Edge
 

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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Twitch is using VP9 now? How does that work for cell phones? Seems kind of unlikely, though the licensing fees for H.264 and H.265 may have gotten too big for them.

https://thebroadcastknowledge.com/tag/twitch/

https://blog.twitch.tv/how-does-vp9-deliver-value-for-twitchs-esports-live-streaming-35db26f6322f

Hmm, seems that this is a recent move. Since the RX 570 supports (hybrid) VP9 decoding, and Firefox supports VP9, that may be what Twitch is defaulting to on my friend's rig, once we dropped in the AMD GPU, and maybe even with the offload, the CPU support requirements are still high with that codec, relative to the age of that CPU?

Edit: Test edit 2.
 
Last edited:

coercitiv

Diamond Member
Jan 24, 2014
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Hmm, seems that this is a recent move. Since the RX 570 supports (hybrid) VP9 decoding, and Firefox supports VP9, that may be what Twitch is defaulting to on my friend's rig, once we dropped in the AMD GPU, and maybe even with the offload, the CPU support requirements are still high with that codec, relative to the age of that CPU?
The Twitch player has a stats window available through Settings > Advanced > Video Stats. It shows a number of important stats related to buffering, latency, skipped frames, but also shows tags for the video and audio codecs.
 

VirtualLarry

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Aug 25, 2001
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The Twitch player has a stats window available through Settings > Advanced > Video Stats. It shows a number of important stats related to buffering, latency, skipped frames, but also shows tags for the video and audio codecs.
Thanks, I wondered if Twitch had the equivalent of YouTube's "Stats for Nerds".

I had my friend do some things to his PC last night.

Uninstall AMD Adrenaline 19.4.1
Uninstall Flash Player
Uninstall DivX player
Uninstall NVidia drivers
Uninstall VLC
Uninstall Interactual Media Player (not sure how that slipped in there, to be honest)

Download and install AMD Adrenaline 19.4.2 Optional

Now he says that all of the twitch prevew mini-windows on this gaming forum he frequents come up (there's like 20 of them on the page). Before, he said that maybe 5-6 would come up, the rest would be black screens.

And he said that Twitch was working, he had the problem of the full-sized windows sometimes coming up with audio and chat, but no video. I figured it had to be a codec or browser-helper-app issue on his system, due to what he had installed previously.
 
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