Hi CPU Usage: Firefox betas / Flash / JW Player / Win XP

[jgg]

First of all, sorry about the long posting and lousy home videos

My question: What - if anything - can I do (besides buy new computers) to reduce the extremely high CPU usage when using Firefox and the Flash plugin to watch videos on my two Win XP machines?

I can see clearly that the problem has to do with the size of the video.
http://edu-net.net/media/fish/ -> size 680x360
http://edu-net.net/media/beforekochel/ -> size 1280x720

Watching the smaller vid is fine on all three machines. The CPU usage on the XP machines is 30%-35% and 1%-2% on Win 7.

However, when watching the bigger vid on XP, CPU usage goes immediately to 100% and stays there till the film is finished. Also, the film is pretty jittery. On the Win 7 machine, it's 5%-10% and looks fine.

When I watch both films stored locally on all three machines, everything's fine.

One factor, of course, is the huge differences among the three computers.

1. Firefox Nightly x64 / Lenovo S20 / Intel Xeon W3520 (quad core @2.67GHz / 18gb DDR3 triple-channel RAM / Win 7 Pro x64 / Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 (768mb RAM) with latest driver

2. Firefox Nightly x32 / IBM Intellistation MPro 9229 / Intel Core2Duo (@2.40GHz) / 4gb DDR2 dual-channel RAM / Win XP Pro x32 / Matrox M9128 (1gb RAM) with latest driver

3. Firefox Aurora / IBM Intellistation ZPro 6223 / Intel Xeon Nocona (single-core @ 3.6GHz) / 4gb DDR2 dual-channel RAM / Win XP x32 / Matrox M9120 PCIe x16 (512mb RAM) with latest driver

Notes:
1. I know that Firefox Nighly and Aurora block hardware acceleration on the Matrox cards. I have the following about:config settings:
gfx.direct2d.disabled;false
gfx.direct2d.force-enabled;true

2. I'm using the latest Flash beta: 11.8.800.149; hardware acceleration is on on all three computers.

3. When watching "professional" streamed vids even full screen, e.g. on YouTube, this doesn't happen.

4. I know XP will be EOL relatively soon. I'm wondering, though, if the switch to Win 7 will make any difference. I'm planning to stick with the 32-bit version.

5. I'm sorry, but I don't have a machine with the Fx or Flash release builds to see if this is a beta issue.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

[aedipuss]

the matrox cards are blocked by mozilla from using gpu acceleration.

On Windows

All vendors other than AMD/ATI, NVIDIA, Intel are blocked

[jgg]

the matrox cards are blocked by mozilla from using gpu acceleration.

On Windows
All vendors other than AMD/ATI, NVIDIA, Intel are blocked

Thanks for your reply.

As I said in my first note, "I know that Firefox Nighly and Aurora block hardware acceleration on the Matrox cards. I have the following about:config settings:
gfx.direct2d.disabled;false
gfx.direct2d.force-enabled;true".

In the meantime I've also tried it on a Lenovo x61 laptop with an onboard Intel graphics chip. The result was exactly the same: 100% CPU.

[aedipuss]

just changing prefs doesn't mean it works. try it set back at default and see if there is any change.

sounds like it's just too old/slow hardware.

switching to win7 32 bit on 4gb ram machines with 1gb of video ram will only leave about 2.5gb of available ram for the o.s. and win7 won't like that much. it certainly won't speed up video processing.

[jgg]

I did a bit of searching and found this.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers
To force-enable WebGL, go to about:config and set webgl.force-enabled=true.
To force-enable WebGL anti-aliasing, go to about:config and set webgl.msaa-force=true.
To force-enable Layers Acceleration, go to about:config and set layers.acceleration.force-enabled=true.

I've made the changes on both XP / Matrox machines.

The one with Nightly, which is a better machine and has a better Matrox card, actually showed a difference: The CPU usage now hovers around 90%. Also, the vid is much smoother; all jittering is gone.

On the Aurora machine, there was no difference whatsoever.

[hello_hello]

This PC is running XP, Firefox 23, Nvidia 8600GT (Driver version 6.14.12.9573, dated 09/02/12), E6750 Core2Duo (at 3.2GHz), Flash 11.7.700.224, 4GB RAM.

The video from your first link had CPU usage sitting on around 13%. It jumped higher for very brief periods with the maximum CPU usage spike being 20%.
I couldn't test the second one properly as my internet connection is too slow and it'd only play for several seconds at a time before pausing, but while it did play CPU usage sat on around 65%.

I don't know if knowing any of that helps at all......

Edit: I had the internet connection to myself for a bit so I tried the second video again. I could play it continuously this time. CPU usage wandered between 60% and 70% and playback was smooth.

[davexnet]

This PC is running XP, Firefox 23, Nvidia 8600GT (Driver version 6.14.12.9573, dated 09/02/12), E6750 Core2Duo (at 3.2GHz), Flash 11.7.700.224, 4GB RAM.

Interesting info. Nothing to be gained by trying a newer driver ? (3xx series ?).
I also run an 8600GT in an XP box - I used 295.73 for a while myself but eventually, moved into the
3xx series because I saw somewhere, a mention that some improvements had been made to the Flash
processing. It may have been a post in the Geforce forum or similar, Whether there's any truth it,
who knows for sure?

I tried the 720p video linked to above and got CPU between 58 - 65% on the 720p video. PC spec is
2GB of DDR1 RAM, AMD64 x2 4200.

On another note, I recently acquired an old Dell Dimension 4600 from 2004 . Still had it's original
Nvidia FX 55xx video card. Windows 7 had been installed but the card was not supported so it ran in
VGA mode. Picked up a 7600GS AGP card from Ebay, and allowed WindowsUpdate to install the new driver
since it's now supported - and it installed the latest and last available the 307.xx driver - PC running fine.
Ironic thing is the 7600GS doesn't even have Flash acceleration at all.

[hello_hello]

I also run an 8600GT in an XP box - I used 295.73 for a while myself but eventually, moved into the
3xx series because I saw somewhere, a mention that some improvements had been made to the Flash
processing. It may have been a post in the Geforce forum or similar, Whether there's any truth it,
who knows for sure?

I have this PC hooked up to a CRT PC monitor and a TV. I've got the video card set to expand video levels to PC levels (TV set for PC levels too). For around a year, after every single reboot I needed to open the Nvidia control panel and reset one of them. Mostly it'd be output to the TV, but the setting was never remembered for both.
A few months ago I reformatted and installed the latest video drivers (whatever they were/are). That took me from having to reset one of the monitors after a reboot to having to reset both of them. A week later I reformatted again and installed the drivers I'm using now. Finally, the video levels for both monitor and TV were remembered between reboots.

Maybe none of that was Nvidia's fault as such. Maybe the second time around I managed to install everything in the "magic" order for it all to work. I think after the first reformat I stupidly updated IE6 to IE8 and it wouldn't run properly, so I gave up and reformatted a second time while only updating to IE7.
I did make an image of Windows and installed programs once I had a properly working setup, so I could probably try new video drivers and if it all goes to crap I could just restore the image, but I'm sooooooo over installing and updating stuff these days, I tend to go with the "if it ain't broke" philosophy.