Slow, choppy video playback with nVidia 8600GT

Question

I have an nVidia 8600GT card (made by EVGA) on a machine with Windows Vista (AMD Athlon X2 processors) and four gigs of ram. It runs pretty good, but I have had some slow/choppy/stuterring video playback issues whenever watching flash videos on Youtube or other sites. The problem is there with both Firefox and IE flash videos, but is maybe worse with Firefox. I also tried Linux with nVidia's binary drivers and it was about the same. I downloaded EVGA precision which allows me to control stuff like the fan and clock speed. The card's temp (in both Vista and Linux) is usually at 66C when idle (not playing a game or watching anything). It goes up a little when watching a video (maybe 68-72C).

Any ideas on how to fix this?

UPDATE: The issues are both with full screen and embedded flash videos. I have Flash 10.0.32.18 (always make sure I use most recent for security), and the CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4000+ at 2.11 GHZ. The current GPU driver installed is the most recent GeForce one from last July.

Answer 1

Make sure you have the latest version of flash, not all versions support hardware acceleration. I think it starts at Flash 9.0.115.0.

What type of CPU do you have? It's possible the bottleneck is not with the GPU.

Answer 2

try and run the the flash WITHOUT hardware acceleration(right click on screen go to properties). this will put it in software rendering mode. something to do with NVIDIA's 8 series cards. Should be fixed with adobe flash player 10.1 beta with GPU acceleration.

Answer 3

What M/B chipset do you have? Have you installed, or looked for updated chipset drivers? There is a huge performance difference on nVidia and VIA chipsets between straight Windows and Windows with the chipset drivers installed.

Answer 4

Something I've experienced with all of the flash-based video sites is that if, for whatever reason, you're not receiving the stream fast enough, you'll get chops and lags waiting for it to buffer the video. (In short, whatever mechanism flash uses for buffering sucks). I usually just let the entire video download before trying to play it.

Answer 5

make sure you have the correct drivers installed! since VIsta installs drivers automatically, wrong drivers might be installed for the Graphics driver! Uninstall the driver for graphics adapter installed by vista then install the drivers for the Geforce from the Driver CD given to you / find drivers supporting vista from manufacturers website/internet!

Answer 6

Some people report this as an interface problem between the GPU and the computer's memory, when the memory is too fast for the 8600GT.

The solution in this case was to reduce the RAM speed in the BIOS to 533 to solve these display problems.

Answer 7

Try this - Download and Install the latest driver from Nvidia. Right click on your desktop and select "Nvidia Control Panel", from the navigation tree in the "Select a Task" pane, click on "Video" and select "Adjust video image settings". To make the adjustments yourself, you should select "Use the NVIDIA settings". You can now make adjustments while playing a video. Try both settings "Edge enhancement and Noise reduction" and in the end, select "Use inverse telecine" as well.

Answer 8

Ok, I've struggled with this for a while. I only have the problem when on a high resolution (that's desktop area.) Also I have the problem anytime I have the graphics card is changing what's on my display. Ie. I could be running factorals and maxing my CPU and it'll play no problem, but if I scroll the audio gets choppy. I found the best way to test it is with Windows media player. When I have the visualization showing it's audio and video are choppy. But if I go to another tab or cover up the visualization (or even choose a simple visualization like "bars") the audio is smooth.

I fixed it by doing the following on Windows Vista. I'm not sure if all steps are neccesary but since I can't duplicate the problem anymore I can't narrow down which step fixed it. First I uninstalled and reinstalled my Nvidia graphics drivers. That didn't work. Then I opened the run window and type "msconfig". Disabled all non-microsoft services under the startup tab. Then rebooted. When it came back up I loaded a song in WMP with a crazy visualization running. It got choppy. I opened task manager, displayed processes from all users, then started ending processes. I don't recall which ones I ended first, and you can cause a BSOD so I wouldn't duplicate my steps here. Just go to the SVChost processes. I started ending the SVCHost ones listed as "mine" (my user account was listed under user name) then moved on to the once running under "local" after ending one of them I got an error that the system will have to be shutdown because a process unexpectedly terminated and media player immediatly stopped being choppy. I held down the windows key and tapped "r" to bring up the run box. Then typed "shutdown -a" to cancel the shutdown. (I don't know if the windows-r and shutdown cancel are neccesary.) I closed WMP and after that the system was pretty much locked up. I could open the start menu but no program would run. So I logged off. This locked up completely and I cold booted. When windows came back up the problem was gone.

It was wierd. I have no idea how that fixed it. In fact the computer "expert" in me can think of about a thousand reasons why that shouldn't have fixed it... but it did.

I wouldn't try this unless you have the exact same symptoms. Ie WMP's visualizations cause choppy audio and video not just flash player. One more point. I JUST did this. I yet don't know what other possible effects this had on my PC so this is a definate "do at your own risk."

Good luck.