Extreme lagging on T60 while browsing and watching Youtube recently

[zoltan87]

I started noticing maybe a couple of months ago, that my Thinkpad T60 (2 GHz CPU, Ati X1400, 3GB RAM) that has been serving my computing needs well in the last 7 years, started to experience extremely severe slowdowns, and lagging while browsing the internet. Also Youtube up until recently has been playing fine, even in 720p full screen. now it can only play smoothly while in small window mode, if I switch it to full screen, it's skipping frames all over the place. I am not sure whether I should maybe just reinstall Windows (it hasn't been reinstalled on my laptop since 2017), or this issue is not on my end, and Google Chrome or Youtube has simply changed something, and I should look into alternative browsers? I have just read a thread earlier here talking about problematic hardware acceleration on a T61 on Win10 while surfing, that would indicate something has changed in certain web browsers, but before I investigate further I would like to know whether other people have been experiencing these issues, starting about 2 months ago?

[RealBlackStuff]

I don't have such a machine any longer, but give a try to some other browsers: Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Waterfox Classic.
My experience with Chrome on my T440p is reasonably OK, but I use it only to watch F1, nothing else.
It still runs W7 and has Chrome Version 109.0.5414.120 (Official Build) (64-bit).
Any version newer than that requires W10/W11.
For anything else (on my T440p) I strictly use Firefox (currently the latest 115.6.0esr (64-bit)).

[kfzhu1229]

I started noticing maybe a couple of months ago, that my Thinkpad T60 (2 GHz CPU, Ati X1400, 3GB RAM) that has been serving my computing needs well in the last 7 years, started to experience extremely severe slowdowns, and lagging while browsing the internet. Also Youtube up until recently has been playing fine, even in 720p full screen. now it can only play smoothly while in small window mode, if I switch it to full screen, it's skipping frames all over the place. I am not sure whether I should maybe just reinstall Windows (it hasn't been reinstalled on my laptop since 2017), or this issue is not on my end, and Google Chrome or Youtube has simply changed something, and I should look into alternative browsers? I have just read a thread earlier here talking about problematic hardware acceleration on a T61 on Win10 while surfing, that would indicate something has changed in certain web browsers, but before I investigate further I would like to know whether other people have been experiencing these issues, starting about 2 months ago?

I have investigated the whole hardware acceleration blacklist things. But I have also discovered that in recent versions of chromium there is a second blacklist that blocks GPU acceleration for video rendering, primarily affecting 8000M series nvidia cards. That one I do not know of a workaround other than using an older version of Brave from early this year (whose auto-update is easy to block) and block the auto-updates
I know you have ATI graphics and without h264 decoder, but recently I also found that the Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics on my Acer Aspire 5517 performing better on that older version of brave than say the latest version of edge or chrome.

[dr_st]

Another thing to pay attention to is that in WinVista/Win7 - Aero is hardware-accelerated, while Classic and Basic themes are not. With a somewhat capable GPU (don't know if the X1400 counts as such), 2D desktop stuff, including video, will actually perform better with an Aero theme, than without it. I don't believe it affects full-screen performance, though, but I might be wrong.

[ZaZ]

Maybe for testing purposes you could boot it to lightweight version of Linux and see if that improves things. You can run it from a disc or USB stick, so there's no need to install it.

[kfzhu1229]

That said I know for a fact that if you do the software rendering override option, even on a GMA 950 with a Core 2 duo T7200 it will actually start doing 720p youtube videos perfectly fine, with GMA 950 taking some small loads while the T7200 taking the rest.

[Lister]

My experience is that the integrated Intel graphics in the T60/61 will play youtube video better than the dedicated Ati/Nvidia graphics. You also have to consider the age of the T60, these machines are past their prime.

[kfzhu1229]

My experience is that the integrated Intel graphics in the T60/61 will play youtube video better than the dedicated Ati/Nvidia graphics. You also have to consider the age of the T60, these machines are past their prime.

Yeah my experience is that software acceleration works better with intel integrated graphics than dGPU probably due to the decreased latency for the CPU to help out the GPU, assuming you aren't bottlenecking the iGPU with slow RAM or slow FSB CPU or something.

[axur-delmeria]

Yeah my experience is that software acceleration works better with intel integrated graphics than dGPU probably due to the decreased latency for the CPU to help out the GPU, assuming you aren't bottlenecking the iGPU with slow RAM or slow FSB CPU or something.

There was another thread about the T61's hardware video decode acceleration, and someone noted that the small amount of VRAM (128MB on most of them) is what causes the poor performance, essentially limiting them to 720p and below. At that point video decode acceleration becomes moot because the Core 2 Duo processors can handle 720p H.264 just fine.

The ATI X1300/1400 don't have any meaningful video decode capability. The Unified Video Decoder hardware was introduced in the Radeon HD 2000 series, which came after.

[dr_st]

That said I know for a fact that if you do the software rendering override option, even on a GMA 950 with a Core 2 duo T7200 it will actually start doing 720p youtube videos perfectly fine, with GMA 950 taking some small loads while the T7200 taking the rest.

Interesting. How do I do that? I found this thread, but it's old and I know from experience these flags are frequently changed or retired completely. You cannot trust a workaround existing in some old version of Chromium still being available...

[kfzhu1229]

Interesting. How do I do that? I found this thread, but it's old and I know from experience these flags are frequently changed or retired completely. You cannot trust a workaround existing in some old version of Chromium still being available...

I just tried this like 2 months ago and used that override software rendering list on an Acer Aspire 5570 with a Core 2 duo T7400 and GMA 950 and 3GB of RAM, it started playing 720p youtube fine almost without any dropped frames actually.
And this list affects GMA X3100 and 4500M/4500MHD as well, it would improve their performance too.
Even though GMA 950 and X3100 have no native h264 decoders, they can however still offload some tasks off the CPU in terms of decoding and that really shows.

[zoltan87]

Thank you everyone for the suggestions, and sorry for the late reply. I ended up going back to using Opera, fullscreen Youtube video playback works perfectly there without lagging. Funny thing is the main reason back then switching to Chrome was that it was generally a lot more responsive than Opera. Unfortunately they have managed to screw it up.