[mythtv-users] Performance issues with new 9400GT

Jay Foster jayf0ster at sbcglobal.net
Wed Sep 16 20:47:35 UTC 2009


I am also using a Sparkle 9400GT, but it's a PCIx card.  lspci reports 
it as "01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 0641 
(rev a1)".  I'm running Mythbuntu 8.10 with 0.21-fixes.  It works fine 
for HD and SD (VGA connector, 1280x768), except for a tearing problem I 
have never been able to resolve.  I'm not using VDPAU.  I'm running the 
180.11 driver I think.  My system also has an Intel Core2 Duo E8500 CPU, 
which handles HD just fine.

Jay


I recently purchased a Sparkle 9400GT PCI video card to use in one of
my frontends to increase performance for playback.  This machine is a
MSI Hetis 915, which ships with onboard Intel graphics.  Before the
new card, the frontend could play SD fine, OTA HD with some difficulty
and would choke on heavy-duty h264 stuff.  With the new card, playback
performance is atrocious.  It can barely play SD video and anything
even remotely HD runs at about 1 fps.  I am running at 1024x768,
outputting through the S-video (actually "S-OUT" a proprietary Nvidia
connector) connector into a SDTV.  The distro is MythBuntu 9.04,
running 0.21-fixes and Nvidia driver version 185.18.36.

Searching the web for solutions I found many things to try (seems to
be a common problem?), but nothing seems to change.  I have
"UseEvents" set in the device section of my xorg.conf as recommended
by 
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/NVidiaProprietaryDriver#Choppy_video.2FHigh_CPU_Usage
but that is the only solution mentioned on that page.  My symptoms are
exactly as described there, with XOrg taking most of the CPU and
Mythfrontend taking the rest.  Different playback profiles yield
identical results, currently I am set to slim.  The log for
mythfrontend doesn't seem to have too many complaints, here is a
sample of starting a recording:

2009-09-16 10:37:39.357 TV: Attempting to change from None to
WatchingPreRecorded
2009-09-16 10:37:40.334 AFD: Opened codec 0xa443960, id(MPEG2VIDEO) 
type(Video)
2009-09-16 10:37:40.334 AFD: codec MP2 has 2 channels
2009-09-16 10:37:40.334 AFD: Opened codec 0xa4cc820, id(MP2) type(Audio)
2009-09-16 10:37:40.336 Opening audio device 'default'. ch 6(2) sr 48000
2009-09-16 10:37:40.336 Opening ALSA audio device 'default'.
2009-09-16 10:37:40.430 VideoOutputXv: XVideo Adaptor Name: 'NV17 Video 
Texture'
2009-09-16 10:37:40.472 OSD Theme Dimensions W: 640 H: 480
2009-09-16 10:37:40.870 TV: Changing from None to WatchingPreRecorded
2009-09-16 10:37:40.871 Realtime priority would require SUID as root.
2009-09-16 10:37:40.979 OpenGLVideoSync()
2009-09-16 10:37:41.013 WriteAudio: buffer underrun
2009-09-16 10:37:41.069 Video timing method: SGI OpenGL
2009-09-16 10:38:19.409 TV: Attempting to change from
WatchingPreRecorded to None
2009-09-16 10:38:19.424 ~OpenGLVideoSync() -- begin
2009-09-16 10:38:19.424 ~OpenGLVideoSync() -- middle
2009-09-16 10:38:19.425 ~OpenGLVideoSync() -- end
2009-09-16 10:38:19.533 TV: Changing from WatchingPreRecorded to None

The realtime message is a little funny because mythfrontend is set as 
SUID root?
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 1484040 2009-03-22 18:09 /usr/bin/mythfrontend.real

Here are the relevant sections of my xorg.conf:
...
Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "fbdevhw"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
Load "freetype"
Load "type1"
EndSection
...
Section "Monitor"
         Identifier   "TV"
         HorizSync    30 - 50
         VertRefresh  60.0
EndSection


Section "Device"
     Identifier     "Device0"
     Driver         "nvidia"
     VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
     Option      "UseEvents" "True"
     Option      "TripleBuffer" "True"
     Option      "TVStandard"    "NTSC-M"
     Option      "TVOverScan" "0.0"
EndSection
...


The overscan is also a huge issue with this card, to fit the gui on
the screen the size is adjusted down from 1024x768 to 888x693.
Different resolutions seem to have similar amounts of overscan, even
with overscanning disabled in xorg.conf.


If anyone else has a similar card that had issues like this, please
chime in and let me know what you did!  Thanks for any insight anyone
can provide on these issues.



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