I was running an Nvidia MX440 in my Myth box and I was having problems with picture quality. I was getting lines across the screen so I figured I'd upgrade from the MX440 to the 6600GT and see if the lines went away. Well, I upgraded and the lines went away, the picture quality also improved quite a bit for both SD and HD.

The problem that I'm having now is that before the "upgrade" I was seeing pretty good CPU usage when watching HD (about 35% for mythfrontend and about 15% for XFree86). Now when I watch recorded programs I get about 40% for Mythfrontend and 50-60% for XFree86. I can SSH to the box while it's running and switch from watching a recording back to the list of shows and the XFree86 drops to less than 2%. Also, when you fastforward the recording the XFree86 usage also goes from 50-60% to around 15%. It almost seams like it's struggling to deinterlace now.

I upgraded the nvidia drivers to the latest version and that has not helped. Anyone?

Uhm... Don't know if this is it but there's a known high CPU usage situation with newer versions of the driver and newer cards with certain features. I think sync to v-blank is one and there are 2-3 others. I'd recommend seeing the MythTV release notes for more information.

Thanks. I checked the release notes and there are a few mentions of similar problems to what I'm having. I may go and switch back to the MX440 and see what I can do about improving the SVideo out signal quality.

The problem I get with the MX440 is that I get interference lines across the TV at about 45 degrees. They almost look like they are at about 60 hertz the way they move across the screen so I think there's some interference somewhere. I'm going to read up on shielding the card or see if there's something I can do. I would almost rather deal with the lower quality picture and have smoother playback.

Thanks again,
Nick

if you didn't already try it make sure opengl sync is turned off or on whichever gives you better performance. Some driver/card combos really don't like the ogl sync

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Xsecrets

Double-check your AGP settings to make sure you aren't force-loading the nVidia AGP drivers. I've heard of that causing the excessive CPU problem for another MythTv user.

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