Why will my new computer lag when displaying HD video?

Well first of all if you have 8Gb of ram using a 32bit OS the PC should see 3.25Gb an not 2GB like you posted. So make sure that is covered before you do anything...

The 9500GT is not going to give you enough frames to view HD 1080p playback, on the other hand 720p should run fine w/o any lag whatsoever. 9500Gt's are known for lagging at 1080p resolutions, specially if it is the 512MB version. 1080p needs more than 32 SP's to run without lagging/stuttering....

My advice would be to try and upgrade to something in the 9600GT/4670 arena and make sure they are 1GB models to give you that extra juice needed for such high resolutions.

Try gettin something like a 9800GT/HD4770 , it might cost a tad more but this way you will have more headroom and will not have to upgrade in a while.....

Hey OvrClkr,

Would this one serve my needs?

http://microcenter.com/single_prod [...] id=0309719

Thanks!

Well as far as 1080p goes it really stresses the GPU.. I have a netbook as well (ATOM 1.6Ghz) and it cannot do 1080p regardless.....Macbooks use the 8800M GPU's that have 112 Sp's.... That is more than enough for 1080p

Me personally, I have never seen 1080p run at respectable frames with anything under a 9600GT or ATI equivalent. Yes you might get a 9500GT to run 1080p but not with the frames needed to sustain flawless playback.

You have to remember that the 9500GT is considered more than low end, 32 SP's is VERY low specially for the amount of processing power that 1080p requires .... The 8800GT is a much faster GPU and can handle any HD playback but they are hard to find at a good price......

I went to Micro Center today and bought the EVGA GTS 250 (512 Megabytes). The salesman said that for the money, the 250 was slightly better than the 9800, and he also said that 512 megabytes would be more than enough to handle HD video. I installed the card but am seeing no improvement. Any suggestions? This is really starting to frustrate me considering I spent over a thousand dollars total to achieve a complete HD workstation. Thanks for your time.

The 2600 is not really a stellar card, it might handle 720p but I doubt 1080p. Also Flash video currently uses the CPU for rendering, that is why some people are awaiting for the Adobe to release Flash that uses the GPU. That is why your sister's MacBook could play youtube videos, as the Core 2 is leaps ahead of the Athlon64 and not because of the integrated graphics.

When you play avi, mpeg, mp4, etc on a video player that uses hardware acceleration (uses the graphics card, i.e. Windows Media Player, Quicktime, VLC, MPC, etc) then would the graphics card only come to play.

Might be the hard drive? It could be the bitrate is so high that your hard drive could barely feed it to the video card. What is your hard disk, and could you try running HDTach and tell us the speed that it is able to determine (or post the graph). Also could you tell us the bitrate of the video (use GSpot or VLC or some other util).

I'm starting to think the graphics card isn't the problem, and yes OvrClkr, I did remove the old drivers before installing the new ones.

Here is the data from HDTach:

http://bashawproductions.com/signa [...] ddrive.jpg

How do I find the bitrate in VLC? I tried playing my videos in there and it was a little smoother... after a time or two they played fine.

My hard drive is a 1 TB SATA drive. I have it partitioned into two partitions, one is all my video and projects and the other is the operating system and everything else.

When I edit, after I play the video a few times it smooths out a bit, which leads me to believe it might be the hard drive...

Thanks for the help guys.

Any ideas, anyone?

OvrlClkr,

Thanks for your help. Here are the results...

Benchmark Results
Drive Index : 68.63MB/s
Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.
Random Access Time : 13.63ms
Results Interpretation : Lower index values are better.

Performance vs. Speed
Drive Index : 9.76kB/s/rpm
Random Access Time : 0.002ms/rpm
Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.

Detailed Benchmark Results
Speed at position 0% : 69.57MB/s (78%)
Speed at position 3% : 89.11MB/s (100%)
Speed at position 7% : 88.13MB/s (99%)
Speed at position 10% : 80.46MB/s (90%)
Speed at position 13% : 80.45MB/s (90%)
Speed at position 17% : 81MB/s (91%)
Speed at position 20% : 78.27MB/s (88%)
Speed at position 23% : 78.27MB/s (88%)
Speed at position 27% : 78.27MB/s (88%)
Speed at position 30% : 75.22MB/s (84%)
Speed at position 33% : 78.27MB/s (88%)
Speed at position 37% : 73.4MB/s (82%)
Speed at position 40% : 75MB/s (84%)
Speed at position 43% : 72.12MB/s (81%)
Speed at position 47% : 71.71MB/s (80%)
Speed at position 50% : 71MB/s (80%)
Speed at position 53% : 71MB/s (80%)
Speed at position 57% : 69.43MB/s (78%)
Speed at position 60% : 69.38MB/s (78%)
Speed at position 63% : 65.14MB/s (73%)
Speed at position 67% : 68.25MB/s (77%)
Speed at position 70% : 63.7MB/s (71%)
Speed at position 73% : 61.33MB/s (69%)
Speed at position 77% : 61.32MB/s (69%)
Speed at position 80% : 60.62MB/s (68%)
Speed at position 83% : 54.38MB/s (61%)
Speed at position 87% : 52.14MB/s (59%)
Speed at position 90% : 51.43MB/s (58%)
Speed at position 93% : 47.6MB/s (53%)
Speed at position 97% : 44.9MB/s (50%)
Speed at position 100% : 46.52MB/s (52%)
Random Access Time : 13.63ms
Full Stroke Access Time : 13.28ms

Performance Test Status
Result ID : WDC WD10EADS-00L5B1 (1TB, SATA300, 3.5", NCQ, 32MB Cache)
Platform Compliance : x86
System Timer : 3.58MHz
Use Overlapped I/O : Yes
I/O Queue Depth : 8 request(s)
Block Size : 1MB

Volume Information
Capacity : 931.51GB

Physical Disk
Model : WDC WD10EADS-00L5B1
Version : 01.01A01
Interface : SATA
Removable Drive : No
Queueing On : Yes

I believe I have a 550 power supply, and the 1080p trailer on Apple played fine.

Thanks again,

~Michael

All right. It seems to be files on my system that don't play well -- compressed Apple trailers play fine. It's really annoying though. Hard to edit with.