AMD 6450 and Bluray

[diellur]

Hi troops,

I have a peculiar issue. I've upgraded my HTPC, and one of the upgrades was to the AMD 6450 GPU from the AMD 4350 (so I could take advantage of bitstreaming). When I play a DVD it's fine, no bother at all. However, when I play a Bluray I quite often get bad stutter. I've updated the drivers, and it still occurs. The thing is, about 50% of the time it'll work absolutely fine...I could play a Bluray, get stutter, close down TMT 5, fire the Bluray back up and it'll play smoothly. I'll not have done anything apart from this, so I'm puzzled why it sometimes plays fine. As another example, I could shutdown the HTPC and play it - no problem. Shutdown and restart again - I get stuttering.

I've noticed on my receiver that when the stutter occurs it seems to be having issues getting the data. The 'HDMI' symbol will flash for as long as the stutter occurs. When it plays smoothly, the relevant icons for TrueHD or DTS-HD show up.

I have tried:

1) Selecting PCM audio and disabling hardware acceleration. No change.
2) Updating drivers. No change.
3) Re-installing the 4350. Bluray playback is fine (although no bitstreaming, unfortunately).
4) DVDs play fine, so the issue seems to be specific to Bluray.

The fact that the 4350 can handle what I throw at it and the 6450 can't suggests that the issue is with either the 6450 card or drivers, but I'd like some opinions.

Full system spec:

CPU: GT620
Motherboard: Asus P8H61-I
RAM: 4GB
GPU: AMD 6450 (with issues) / AMD 4350 (no issues)
HDD: 60GB Corsair Nova SSD
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium (x64)

Thanks.

 

[hang-the-9]

Have you tried a different media player?

 

[diellur]

Not yet...the fact that my older GPU works fine with it suggests it's not the issue (it's on my to-do list this evening).

 

[diellur]

Update: I've RMAd the 6450. I reinstalled Windows, did a clean install of the most up-to-date driver and then fired up a Bluray. First playback...fine. Second playback...stuttering again.

I decided against trying another software suite for playback. I'd just have to buy it, and from what I've read the 6450 seems to be one of those cards that can be a bit funny. Guess I just lucked out.

I've decided to go for a 5570 instead. Should be fine for an HTPC and it supports bitstreaming...hopefully it supports Blurays as well!

 

[alduda]

Hi, I am playing now with 6450 and I am playing back 3D BD movies on my Sony TV through HDMI 1.4. I see some constant stuttering, if I use TMT 5. Actually I would say that the playback is not very smooth. But I think that if someone not very experienced, may not even mention this. But if I use Power DVD - all is fine !!! So it is not just the problem of video card.

 

[diellur]

Hi...thanks for the info.

I actually solved this a while ago...it was a combination of using the onboard NIC for both my HTPC and server (replaced them with Dlink ones) and the drivers I was using for the GPU. I get virtually flawless playback on Catalyst 12.1 with TMT5 now. I'll give Power DVD a go and see how that compares.