Upgraded video on my pc but bluray and hd playback still not good

[spirit523]

Greetings all

Just did a bit of an upgrade to my older dell rig. Previously I had a dell e510 with a pentium 4 3.00 ghz cpu and 2gb memory. I have just upgraded the power supply to 550 watts, installed an LG bluray burner and updated the graphics card to a Gigabit Nvidia Gforce GTS 250 with 1gb memory.

The problem is that when I try to play bluray discs or bluray material from the hard disk, I still get pauses and short stalls. Even when the video does not stall I can detect that it just isnt quite as smooth as it should be. I would think that my video card should have plenty of horsepower to handle bluray or more intense graphics. I dont really use it for gaming at all.

My question: Is my cpu a bottleneck for smooth performance? How do I tell if my video card is truly being fully taken advantage of? Is there a way to determne if all of the graphics work is being offloaded to the graphics card and that the system cpu is not choking on trying to process it?

Im kinda of handy upgrading stuff but as far as knowing what is happening on a software level...forget it. So if your answers could be basic i'd greatly appreciate it.

Kind regards

Scott

[aedipuss]

turn on the task manager and watch the cpu usage levels during playback, i'd guess the p4 isn't nearly fast enough for HD video. control/alt/delete, then click on the processes tab, and then the cpu column twice to get the highest cpu using programs to the top.

[budz]

you prolly need at least a dual core cpu...what software are you using for bd playback?

[fritzi93]

You need a dual-core CPU *or* a DXVA capable video card, preferably both. Try MPCHC, it can use DXVA, as your video card seems to be okay. If you can't play HD satisfactorily with MPCHC, it's not happening.