Users with two graphics cards

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

I recently put in a PCI graphics card for a 3rd display, however i ran into an old problem i used to have a long time ago with my first dual monitor setup. Whenever I use two different cards, and run WMP on the secondary card,the CPU useage goes to 100%. I asume hardware acceleration is only for the primary,how would i enable it for the second card too? Or is this not even the problem?

Win XP Pro
WMP9
crummy TV rip of MST3k

it eats allll my CPU, i'd love to fix this so i can use my 9" mini CRT as a TV 🙂

 

[buleyb]

what is the pci card you installed? If it has no hardware acceleration at all, you can't enable it, period. That would account for your CPU chugging so hard...

 

[beatle]

Probably because the second card doesn't support overlay. My Matrox Millenium II doesn't support it and I can't play video on the display it feeds. Performance is abysmal, even on my 3.09GHz P4C.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

its a sh**ty MX220 core, maxes out my 2.6ghz barton instantly. i guess that explains it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: AWhackWhiteBoy
its a sh**ty MX220 core, maxes out my 2.6ghz barton instantly. i guess that explains it.

I'm not familiar with an MX220, only a GF2 MX400/MX200/original, and a GF4 MX420/MX440/MX460. Is your card from the GF2 MX or GF4 MX family?

Either way, I don't think that it is because the card itself lacks hardware-accelleration support. It's more due to Windows' driver issues. I've used dual-monitors before, connected to cards both with hardware-acceleration support, along with a video-capture card. It seems that Windows' only supports video-accelerate/overlay features on the primary display, period. It emulates overlay in software (host CPU copies/colorspace-converts data on the fly) for all other displays. No doubt that is what your problem is.

Sorry to say, I don't think that there is a solution, short of possibly replacing your seperate cards with a single display, driving dual outputs. (My "new" Radeon 9200 can do that, but you have to manually change some settings in the driver, to get video-overlay to even show up on both screens, while running in "clone mode". Otherwise it only shows on the primary display. Not quite directly related to your issue, but it seemed wierd to me, and it's yet another illustration that Windows' seems to have issues with video-accelerate on anything but the primary display.)