Mike Lowery
May 4th 04, 03:13 PM
Xref: kermit microsoft.public.windowsxp.video:45909
I've been doing some tests on an older laptop using a multicast WMV9 video stream and Media Player 9. The laptop is dual-boot with
XP and 2000. This is what I've found:
* With either OS, if the stock video drivers are used and you try to view a video at 2x normal size (320x240 zoomed to 640x480 in
the player, or 200%) the CPU utilization maxes out at 100%.
* Installing the latest Intel video drivers on XP causes the CPU utilization to drop back to about 30-40%, no matter what size is
chosen. Even full-screen viewing does not increase the utilization.
* With Windows 2000 and these same video drivers (the same driver works with both OS's) the CPU still stays pegged at 100%.
Updating the video driver seems to have no effect.
Why would this be? Is there something about XP that offloads more of the work onto the GPU instead of the CPU, even with the same
video drivers installed? I didn't expect there to be any difference.
I've been doing some tests on an older laptop using a multicast WMV9 video stream and Media Player 9. The laptop is dual-boot with
XP and 2000. This is what I've found:
* With either OS, if the stock video drivers are used and you try to view a video at 2x normal size (320x240 zoomed to 640x480 in
the player, or 200%) the CPU utilization maxes out at 100%.
* Installing the latest Intel video drivers on XP causes the CPU utilization to drop back to about 30-40%, no matter what size is
chosen. Even full-screen viewing does not increase the utilization.
* With Windows 2000 and these same video drivers (the same driver works with both OS's) the CPU still stays pegged at 100%.
Updating the video driver seems to have no effect.
Why would this be? Is there something about XP that offloads more of the work onto the GPU instead of the CPU, even with the same
video drivers installed? I didn't expect there to be any difference.