T61 NVS140M hardware decoding performance?

[twistero]

I recently acquired a cheap 2007/11 Nvidia NVS140M board for my T61 FrankenPad. It works fine on both the internal LCD and VGA output, and passes several hours of FurMark without problem, so it looks like the Nvidia chip is still fine for now.

However, when I tried playing 1080p h.264 HD videos using hardware decoding (DXVA), the video runs far slower than normal, and video output garbles and becomes mosaic-y. It seems like the GPU just can't keep up with the decoding. Of course, if I turn off hardware acceleration and let the CPU handle decoding, then everything works fine.

So, is it normal that NVS140M doesn't have the capabilities of decoding 1080p content? Have anyone tried something similar, and got similar results?

I may put up some test videos later.

[Cigarguy]

What codec are you using? All my T61s run 1080p just fine using Klite Codec. My T60 on the other hand struggle with 1080p but runs 720p just fine.

[twistero]

What codec are you using? All my T61s run 1080p just fine using Klite Codec. My T60 on the other hand struggle with 1080p but runs 720p just fine.

I use MPC-HC for player, ffdshow for codec and EVR for renderer. If I turn off DXVA for H264 in ffdshow configurations, then the videos play smoothly. If I turn DXVA on, however, I see choppy and blocky video.

[TuuS]

I've never had a problem playing any video with the nvs140m. I think the problem is the renderer you're using. Do you have another nvs140m system you can try the harddrive in just to confirm it's not a gpu issue? it doesn't sound like one to me, but this chip does tend to fail slowly compared to the fx570m that generally fails totally and all at once.

[axur-delmeria]

Try LAV filters http://code.google.com/p/lavfilters/, as it has a better DXVA2 implementation (for Windows Vista/7/8, XP only has DXVA1).

LAV offers two DXVA2 decoders: Native and Copyback.

Native is faster, but will not work with the vsfilter subtitle renderer.

Copyback works with vsfilter, but can incur a performance penalty due to having the decoded video frames copied back from GPU VRAM to system RAM (hence "Copyback").
The issue stems from older GPUs having poor performance when moving data from GPU to CPU.

[twistero]

I've never had a problem playing any video with the nvs140m. I think the problem is the renderer you're using. Do you have another nvs140m system you can try the harddrive in just to confirm it's not a gpu issue? it doesn't sound like one to me, but this chip does tend to fail slowly compared to the fx570m that generally fails totally and all at once.

Unfortunately I don't have another nvs140m board to test with.

As for the renderer, well, EVR is the only one that supports DXVA and is fast enough. The other options for DXVA (EVR-custom presenter, sync, madvr, etc) are choppy for 1080p video even using CPU decoding.

Try LAV filters http://code.google.com/p/lavfilters/, as it has a better DXVA2 implementation (for Windows Vista/7/8, XP only has DXVA1).

LAV offers two DXVA2 decoders: Native and Copyback.

I've switched to LAV and tried various h264 video files ranging from Main@3.0 to High@4.1, with both DXVA2 decoders. Looks like for 720p resolution and below, DXVA2-Native can decode the video in real time, but for 1080p it can't keep up and produce skipped / corrupted frames. DXVA2-copyback on the other hand only handles some 720p videos, for other 720p and all 1080p sources the video end up being much slower than audio.

[axur-delmeria]

DXVA2-Native can decode the video in real time, but for 1080p it can't keep up and produce skipped / corrupted frames

Perhaps the Purevideo VP2 decoder engine inside the 140M isn't clocked high enough.

DXVA2-copyback on the other hand only handles some 720p videos, for other 720p and all 1080p sources the video end up being much slower than audio.

That's the GPU-to-CPU memcopy issue at work.


Try switching to CUDA (LAV filters has that option too) and test again.

On the other hand, since the NVS 140M is similar to the Geforce 8400M I wouldn't expect too much from it.

I remember testing CUDA-based H.264 playback on a desktop with a Geforce 8400GS card . There were some skipping issues @ 1080p, but I can't remember if there were corrupted frames.