Would 3x 1080P Twitch streams bog down an Athlon II X4 640?

[VirtualLarry]

My friend has an older PC, and he's been complaining that his PC seems slow.

He has an AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0Ghz quad-core, on a 780 or 785G mobo. The mobo's IGP has busted hardware acceleration, so we had to disable that feature in Flash Player.

He often watches multiple Twitch streams at once.

My working theory is, 6-12 months ago, the streams that he was watching weren't all 1080P, like they are now a days. So now his poor little 3.0Ghz AMD quad-core is working much harder, to watch the streams, than it used to.

He has an SSD, which I tested, and it seems to be working fine, without any major performance degradation.

OS is Win7 64-bit.

I'm suggesting that perhaps he invest in a video card that has HW acceleration for video playback.

What would be a good choice? In terms of increasing cost.
GT610 (Fermi) (DDR3)
GT620 (Fermi) (DDR3)
GT630 (Kepler) (DDR3)
HD6670 (DDR3)
HD7750 (DDR3)
Or should he consider a platform upgrade? He doesn't have a lot of money.

A few months ago, I gave him an A6-5400K rig with 4GB DDR3 (single-channel, IIRC). A single 1080P stream on that rig takes like 60% CPU time. It's only an FM2 mobo though, so I couldn't drop in a Kaveri or an upcoming Carizzo.

 

[SPBHM]

60fps streams with hadware acceleration off will probably fully load 2 cores or a little more from this CPU, lower res/framerate/bitrate streams will load a lot less, so it's difficult to say.

for the 60FPS streams my old Radeon HD5K with HW acceleration reduces CPU usage to around 60% of the CPU usage with it off, if you are running with no hw acceleration and a new card adds that, it could make a very significant difference.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm going to try a GT610 card, and see if that helps.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Just out of curiosity, he's sure it isn't a bandwidth issue with his ISP, he has a fast enough connection? I don't know what kind of compression Twitch might use, but I bet he needs at least 20-25Mb/s or so (rough guess).

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just out of curiosity, he's sure it isn't a bandwidth issue with his ISP, he has a fast enough connection? I don't know what kind of compression Twitch might use, but I bet he needs at least 20-25Mb/s or so (rough guess).

His connection speed is in excess of 100Mbit/sec down, but he only has a router with 10/100 ports, so he gets around 89Mbit/sec down.

 

[waffleironhead]

How much memory does he have allocated to the Igp?

 

[soccerballtux]

How much memory does he have allocated to the Igp?

that's actually a good question I hadn't thought about as it relates to "busted hardware acceleration". Does google say anything about the broken HWA? Might be just one transform that can be disabled in the driver at the registry level or something.

that said, twitch is definitely using h264 if I had to guess, so 3 of those at 1080P, in spite of the lower bandwidth stream, is not going to be simple to decode. Yes, that would cause it to bog down. He shouldn't need more RAM.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, apparently, my theory is wrong. Even with no streams loaded in Firefox, Newegg, BestBuy, and TigerDirect all loaded kind of slowly. So I suspected DNS issues, so I punched in Google DNS into his router, but that didn't help either.

His SSD checked out fine. Malwarebytes scan was clean.

Not quite sure what to think. CPU was barely being used.

www.speedtest.net showed 10ms latency, 86Mbit/sec down, 12Mbit/sec up.

Edit: He's on Comcast, and has a Netgear WNR2000 router, which recently had a firmware update to support IPv6. Only, apparently there is a problem with Comcast's IPv6 and Netgear routers. It works initially, but a few days later, you lose the IPv6 addresses. So I disabled IPv6 on the ethernet adapter. (PC is hardwired.)

I don't know if that helped much, or if I had to reboot for that setting to take effect. (I didn't.)

 

[VirtualLarry]

It may just be a "feature" of the new Firefox version, that it waits for content to be downloaded before the initial paint. There used to be a tunable, "nglayout.paintdelay", but it seems to be missing / hardcoded in the newest Firefox versions.

The psychological effect though, of waiting with a blank screen to paint, is that of a perception of increased lag though, even though it may take the same latency to achieve a fully-rendered page as prior versions.

 

[soccerballtux]

It may just be a "feature" of the new Firefox version, that it waits for content to be downloaded before the initial paint. There used to be a tunable, "nglayout.paintdelay", but it seems to be missing / hardcoded in the newest Firefox versions.

The psychological effect though, of waiting with a blank screen to paint, is that of a perception of increased lag though, even though it may take the same latency to achieve a fully-rendered page as prior versions.

opera had a page paint delay, I always thought it actually made things look faster because you avoid the pop-in.