[ATI] 50Hz isn't quite 50Hz (1 Viewer)

[logifuse]

I've just set up an Arctic Entertainment passively cooled PC as my bedroom HTPC & it's my first foray in to the ATI world for quite a long time (it has a Mobility Radeon HD5430).

Setup was simple enough, all up & running connecting to my TV server(4TR/Argus), but I've struck an issue that I haven't really seen on my Nvidia GPUs. When the Nvidias are running at 50Hz, TV is nice & smooth (various MPEG2 channels of 576i, 720p & 1440x1080i) using either LAV CUVID or the MS decoder, & the OSD (shift 1) shows a pretty straight red line & a measured refresh rate of about 50.001XX.

On the ATI, video isn't quite as smooth (various decoders & CCC settings make no difference) & the OSD measured refresh rate is around 50.007XX with a very rough red line & the occasional dropped frame. I've tried various driver versions (11.12, 11.4) & different decoders, experimental TSReaders & DShowhelpers & nothing really makes much difference.

The system is very responsive with an SSD & Windows 7 64 bit SP1 (all up to date), nothing's maxing out, & I'm outputting 720p@50Hz with a slight resize (sorry, not exactly sure what ATI call that).

The story is pretty similar when watching 23.976FPS material at 59.94Hz. On Nvidia the graph would show a nice 2:3 pull up happening, on the ATI it's a much rougher graph & playback is noticeably not as smooth.

ATI folks, what's the story with your configurations? Flat red lines, or rough ripples?

Thanks!

 

[edterbak]

Hi logifuse,

Trying to help you a bit.
1st check Im thinking of is to see if AERO is enabled. It should be enabled, and if it is disabled it coulc result in the things you see.

2nd thing I am thinking of is in the line of the ATI mobile card is not or barely handling the settings with de-interlacing.
What you could do to check this is to start mediaportal in windowd mode. Start CCC next to it and check the GPU/MEM/Temp graph in the overclocking section. During playback, do you see the gpu utilisation go up to 70-90%? Remember to keep the window of MP as big/visible as possible in order to keep the gpu working.
If the utilisation is as high as 90% at times, it is likely the settings for de-interlacing are just a little bit too ambitious. I would feel comfortable with a load up to 60-70% max

In CCC unde the tab "Video" you should manally set the deinterlacing settings to the lowest possible at first. (weave??)
All other settings like skin color, whiter whites and settings like shown below, etc... disable them all. If you see a good and clean image when all is disabled, you have found the problem and can start working from there to enable one by one depending on what you like. Me - personally - I have them all disabled, except for the 0-255 color settings and the de-interlacing setting i have set it to vector adaptive, because my hd5670 can handle it fine.

I hope you will find the problem in the end.

 

[logifuse]

Hi edterbak,

Thanks very much for your reply. Aero is enabled. I don't have the overclocking section in my CCC, but I ran GPU-Z & the utilization is in that 60-70% range you mentioned.

It didn't seem to matter where the deinterlacing setting was set to, so that doesn't look like the problem. 720p channels show the same results too.

I also ran some MPC-HC tests (using the graphs/stats you can access with the MS DirectX SDK installed) & the results were pretty much the same.

I'm running Win 7 SP1 64 bit, yet the versions of these Arctic systems supplied with Windows pre-installed (mine was barebones) have 32 bit & Arctic only have 32 bit drivers on their site (they're just 32 bit versions of drivers from the various component suppliers such as ATI, Realtek, Intel, etc., nothing actually system specific). I suppose I'll do a fresh install of 32 bit & go from there.

 

[edterbak]

Ok,

Are you using the Dynamic Refreshrate Changer in MP? Did you try all resolutions with the refreshrates possible from within windows? It asks you to press Yes or No to the question if you see an image. If this has not been done yet it could be the refreshrate is not changing in reallity from inside MP.

If you want the ATI to switch to the 23.976 hz refreshrate, you should set it in the DRC as 23.

Do you have the option to output 1080 @ 23.976 / 24 / 25 / 29.9 / 30 / 50 / 59.94 / 60hz ? Which ones can your setup handle?
I would test if the problem is still there when you play your media at 1:1 ratio instead of 2:3 pulldown. So if your able to set 23.976 hz and play that material, it should be perfect.

You have a mobile hd right? I presume it is an onboard thing. (I cant see your system specs... forum error??) Is this card working with shared memory? How much have you given it? MP requires a lot of that, so I would set it at ~1gb shared.

Regarding the drivers 64/32 bits. You can just uninstall the 32bit ones and download/install the 64 bit versions. (in reversed order ofcourse ... ghehe)

Good luck

 

[logifuse]

Thanks again,

It's looking more & more like a hardware fault. Testing at 50Hz with 25/50fps material, it simply doesn't output close enough to 50Hz to give a flat red line. At 23.976Hz with 23.976fps material it's the same story. Tried DRC in MP & it switches correctly, but that's not the problem. The problem is that the graphics card/driver version of 50Hz is around 50.007Hz & that causes stutter (with 23.976 it's around 23.982)

It's not my main system (which is in my specs), but it is a mobility Radeon (see the link to the site in my first post). It has 512MB of its own memory & the BIOS options for shared RAM are set to maximum (tried all options - the same).

I installed W7 32 bit yesterday & the results were the same.

Thanks very much for your help, but I fear I'm at the point where I will need to take it up with Arctic & see if I can get a satisfactory result.

 

[Spragleknas]

I think I'm experiencing the same thing. I can't remember experiencing this in the past.

(Might be worth uploading some logs, or no dev or tester will ever have a look...)

 

[logifuse]

Yeah, but I can't see how it's an MP issue as I replicate it outside of MP (using the MPC-HC/DirectX SDK/Cheese Slices video test).

 

[Spragleknas]

Try disabling advanced video features in CCC (skin-tone, brighter white etc). Seems to have helped here. (Still 50.0007~ Hz, tho').

Regarding logs: Merely pointing out that any post containing them might stand a better chance of getting dev/tester attention...

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Yeah, but I can't see how it's an MP issue as I replicate it outside of MP (using the MPC-HC/DirectX SDK/Cheese Slices video test).

It could be a driver issue, try running the dpc latency tool, this will not pinpoint what is exactly wrong, but will point to hardware, ie driver, so then we can narrow it down.

Thanks

 

[Owlsroost]

logifuse - post a screen capture with the MP render stats enabled, and the evr.log

The minor frequency error shouldn't give you rough lines - just an occasional repeated frame (about one frame every 2 minutes). Rough lines are normally caused by performance issues.

PD's suggestion of running DPC latency checker is a good idea.

I'd also look carefully at the 'PCD' value on the render stats screen (top right corner) - if this is very variable you might have problems on the audio side of things (you could try using ReClock or MP Audio Renderer with video playback and see if things improve) - the timebase 'clock' for video rendering comes from the audio renderer (normally) so audio problems can affect the video.

Tony