[rmerikle]

I have not been overly happy with the video performance of my main HPTC and am thinking it may be due to my budget GPU card. The SUS ENGT430 DC SL/DI/1GD3 GeForce GT 430 went on sell at Newegg and so I pulled the trigger on one. Everything I read says this is a great HTPC video card and should meet my needs. My question is whether there is anything I should do to ensure that this card is doing the majority of the work since the CPU in my HTPC is not the fastest? Is just installing the video drivers for this card enough or are there more tweaks I should be doing? I use MCE and followed the Sticky Post Setup Guide that uses the Shark Codex and then I use MediaPortal/MyFilms to play all my videos. I did some searches, but did not find anything recent that discussed this issue.


Thanks in advance

 

[Sammy2]

I use this card and for local playback I use MPC-HC with LAV and madVR. It works with the "medium" settings of madVR as the more aggressive settings of madVR now require more GPU than this card has. That said, most, if not all, of my content is 1080p and it looks fantastic with this card as does Live/Recorded TV using WMC. I don't use MediaPortal or MyFilms so I cannot help there with setting it up beyond the basic driver settings.

 

[Andrew Hornfeck]


I don't do nVidia although I do MediaPortal and WMC and use $20 HD4550 & HD6450 with great success.  Neither of them does MPEG-2 acceleration (ATSC tuning, DVDs, etc) although they are really fantastic at .264 offloading as long as the codec is DxvA as would be the case with the Win 7 MS-DTV codec, and the one in MPC-HC as well as its stand-alone filter you can use with MediaPortal.  I playback MPEG-2 using 25% of my BE-2350 dual-core and 10% of my AMD 3.48GHz quad-core in terms of CPU.  For 1080p .264 it's in the 15% (BE-2350) and 2% (quad-core) CPU usage.  Also I shy way, away from codec paks -- sorry Shark -- as they're GPU intensive and I'm happy with the basic codecs in virgin form!

 

It's my understanding the nVidia is equally equipped so having DxvA codecs in use would be key! 

 

In every case having a bunch o' Post-Processing sent to the GPU will eventually max it out.  As far as my AMD I set no edge enhancement, no auto-contrast, no... no.. no... and all is well -- I mean, if it's all digital why should I need all this post-processing???  It's sorta like doing a bunch of "sound fields" in your AVR when you give it a prestine Dolby-Digital audio stream!

 

When you add a video card, be sure to disable your on-board video and free up any "shared" RAM...  this also can increase your WEI on the RAM as a side point!

 

BTW, you didn't say what you were concerned about WITH your video performance in the OP.

 

[Andrew Hornfeck]


Any updates to report???

 

[Shark007]

Sure, I'll update... for the original poster.

read the Shark007 Setup and usage page

The bottom of the page will teach you how to offload to the GPU instead of using the CPU for video decoding.