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<blockquote data-quote="d3cadent" data-source="post: 854647" data-attributes="member: 72906">Thank you for the suggestion. The 430, besides cheaper, has more variants with passive cooling (an important factor for me).&nbsp;However, I have checked video playback on the Geforce 210 with GPU-Z. Interestingly, none of the metrics has reached 80%. GPU Load is about 50-75%, Memory Controller Load is ~50% and Video Engine Load is 30-35% in CUDA mode. When switching to DXVA2 Native mode, then Video Engine Load drops to 0% and CPU load increases considerably. That's normal I guess.&nbsp;I was trying to correlate hiccups during playback with changes in the metrics. What I've seen (naked eye observation) is that after a stutter (they come in every 5-10 seconds) both GPU Load and Memory Controller Load drops a bit, then returns to normal. My speculation, considering the above, is that it's not raw decoding performance that causes stuttering but some sort of other bottleneck. Maybe video memory bandwidth or something similar.&nbsp;The system itself is a Core2Duo 2GHz with 4GB RAM. This is definitely not a strong machine by today's standards, yet it still has quite a lot of headroom as a HTPC. Even the CPU seems to be no bottleneck since video decoding without GPU assistance is still good. Yet I have the feeling that optimally this task should not be carried out by the CPU but offloaded to the GPU instead. Altogether, I have the feeling that upgrading the video would give better results not because more CUDA cores or better raw decoding performance but because wider bandwidth, faster VRAM or something similar.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="d3cadent, post: 854647, member: 72906"] Thank you for the suggestion. The 430, besides cheaper, has more variants with passive cooling (an important factor for me). However, I have checked video playback on the Geforce 210 with GPU-Z. Interestingly, none of the metrics has reached 80%. GPU Load is about 50-75%, Memory Controller Load is ~50% and Video Engine Load is 30-35% in CUDA mode. When switching to DXVA2 Native mode, then Video Engine Load drops to 0% and CPU load increases considerably. That's normal I guess. I was trying to correlate hiccups during playback with changes in the metrics. What I've seen (naked eye observation) is that after a stutter (they come in every 5-10 seconds) both GPU Load and Memory Controller Load drops a bit, then returns to normal. My speculation, considering the above, is that it's not raw decoding performance that causes stuttering but some sort of other bottleneck. Maybe video memory bandwidth or something similar. The system itself is a Core2Duo 2GHz with 4GB RAM. This is definitely not a strong machine by today's standards, yet it still has quite a lot of headroom as a HTPC. Even the CPU seems to be no bottleneck since video decoding without GPU assistance is still good. Yet I have the feeling that optimally this task should not be carried out by the CPU but offloaded to the GPU instead. Altogether, I have the feeling that upgrading the video would give better results not because more CUDA cores or better raw decoding performance but because wider bandwidth, faster VRAM or something similar. [/QUOTE]

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