Choppy video @ 4k

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Nitrousbird

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Choppy video @ 4k

#1

Post by Nitrousbird » Sat Dec 03, 2016 2:19 pm

Rig:
ASRock Haswell motherboard
i3 4330
4GB ram
240GB SSD + 1TB hard drive
GTX 1050 video card
Win 7
70" Samsung 630 4K TV, using PC input setting with 4:4:4 Chromascaling

Issue: At 4k resolution, live and recorded content is jumpy. I originally tried it with the integrated 4600HD graphics, but that can only handle 30Hz and I figured it was part of the problem. With the GTX 1050, at both 30 and 60Hz it is still jumpy, especially with any significant movement on screen. Setting it back to 1080p resolution fixes the issue.

I would much rather not change resolutions back and forth, as I also use the HTPC for other viewing besides WMC. Any suggestions? The video card should be more than capable of handling 4k video @ 60Hz...should be a little overkill for this setup.

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Shark007

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#2

Post by Shark007 » Sat Dec 03, 2016 3:39 pm

You need proper drivers and video decoder to support the 1050 for hardware decoding. At this time, the Nvidia drivers do not fully support the capabilities of the 1050 for hardware decoding so your system drops down to software decoding and that I3 just cannot keep up.
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DavidinCT

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#3

Post by DavidinCT » Sat Dec 03, 2016 5:37 pm

If it is drivers, like it sounds like, Check out http://www.guru3d.com/

There is a lot of driver experts there who modify drivers and might have something that would work for you.

I run at 4K @60hz with a GTX750 (HDMI 1.4a) and I am able to run 4K high bit videos with out any sign of it being choppy, as expected live tv and recorded tv is flawless.

WIndows Media Center at 30hz is not pretty....tried that myself for a while when trying to go to 4k..
-Dave
Twitter @TheCoolDave

Windows Media Center certified and WMC MVP 2010 - 2012

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Shark007

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#4

Post by Shark007 » Sun Dec 04, 2016 1:41 am

I would venture to guess... although I am sure he'll correct me if needed,
Most likely in Daves case, he has a much stronger CPU and software decoding is serving him well.
His 750 is not doing the decoding just as your 1050 is not doing the decoding.

For the record, software decoding (CPU) is more desirable and error free than hardware decoding (GPU)
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Nitrousbird

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#5

Post by Nitrousbird » Sun Dec 04, 2016 2:35 pm

I am not buying the CPU isn't strong enough argument. I am running 4k @ 60Hz right now and watching my CPU utilization. It is barely above idle but the video is still choppy. Chrome uses way more CPU than WMC is using.

This means that the GPU is probably doing the work. Now could the GPU not be processing correctly - sure. How can I force it to do software decoding?

Oh, my specs above were slightly off...8GB ram (I built this over a year ago - must have been a sale going on RAM at the time, as it is overkill).

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Shark007

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#6

Post by Shark007 » Sun Dec 04, 2016 3:36 pm

I was not trying to sell you anything.
Chrome uses Media Foundation to access the GPU for playback. WMC is currently using Directshow and your CPU
You are comparing apples to oranges. I am sorry to hear that you think all video playback is the same process.
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Nitrousbird

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#7

Post by Nitrousbird » Sun Dec 04, 2016 4:03 pm

I am not saying all video playback is the same (it isn't). But if I am CPU limited, why would I show nearly no CPU use? If I really needed to upgrade CPU's, I'd throw an i7 in there and call it a day. Probably out $100 after reselling my i3. Before I would do that I need something that would really prove that this is the problem.

I played with some more settings in the NVidia control panel. I played with a bunch of stuff, but I think killing of desktop scaling fixed my choppy video problem. Instead I caused a new one - tearing. Anything high motion will tear. Mind you I don't have this problem on videos played via Kodi or OpenPHT (haven't tried WMC inside Kodi as most of the content I view is copy protected, so it is pretty useless for that).

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Shark007

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#8

Post by Shark007 » Sun Dec 04, 2016 4:33 pm

I'd advise waiting for Dave to chime in once more but it would be my opinion that an i7 would solve your issue.
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Nitrousbird

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#9

Post by Nitrousbird » Sun Dec 04, 2016 10:40 pm

It looks like I resolved the issue (with my existing hardware).

I changed a ton of stuff trying, so I can't say for 100% certain what was the number 1 fix. The last change I made was the NVIDIA PhysX setting to full quality and Auto-select for GPU/CPU processing. I also set scaling to No and for the Display to do all scaling duties. I also made sure NVIDIA is not doing any video processing (color, sharpness,etc).

I did a RegEdit as well on WMC display settings, changing the display depth check from 32 to 64.

It seems the combo of all of this fully resolved my issue. No chop, no tearing - looks the same as it did with 1080p settings.

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