GeForce 6150 issues

[Mahoney]

Hi all,

I'm contemplating RMAing my MSI-K8NGM2-FID 6150 motherboard. Using VMR9 in Sage, with or without FSE and with both PureVideo and the SageTV decoders, I get terrible screen corruption - in PureVideo it happens within seconds, with the SageTV decoders I get a bit longer but still within 30 seconds. I get a sort of gird affair with one frozen frame filling half the squares and the movie continuing in the other half, and the grid made up of blue or purple lines.

The case has sides and lid off, so there's plenty of air flow - yet the passive heat sink on the 6150 part of the chipset is so hot to the touch it burns me within a couple of seconds of touching it, and that is within minutes of turning the PC on, without trying to play back video.

All suggests to me that the chipset is running far too hot for some reason, and the effort of doing 3D accelerated video playback pushes it over the edge, rather faster with PureVideo where I am asking it to do serious deinterlacing work. I'm only playing back SD PAL, not HD or anything like that.

Specs are:

Athlon XP 3000+
512MB RAM
XP Home
SageTV 5.02
ForceWare 91.31
PureVideo 1.02-223
MSI-K8NGM2-FID outputting 1920x1080@60 via DVI to a 1080p TV

Anyone seen anything like this? Obviously if it's my fault in some way I'd rather not start the RMA process!

[emok]

Mahoney,

I see this too. My description here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...5&postcount=10

I haven't tried any systematic testing but I've done a fair amount of tweaking and haven't been able to solve the problem. Based on my limited set of observations, I only see this behavior in Sage, I've tried using the settings that blade mentioned for WMP to use VMR9. I've tried using various decoders through Sage with no luck. I've had my system running for several months now and this problem actualy cropped up later.

I'm thinking it may be related to:

1. memory (because this video card uses system memory)
2. JVM (perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we're running back at 1.4.x)
3. motherboard (maybe just a bad motherboard?)
4. forceware drivers

[Mahoney]

Yes, I saw that. I've had this problem right from the start; I'm running Java 5.06, so that's not the issue. Have you tried many different ForceWare/PureVideo combinations? Interesting that it cropped up later, could be a software change you made or maybe as you say the motherboard was damaged by heat later on. But you say it goes away after a Sage standby? I'll give that a go.

Thanks for the reply.

[bhyman1]

I've run into that problem several times with my 6150 based clients. It has to do with the Video/Audio and DVD settings in Sage.

First off, get the latest Drivers from Nvidia.

Then try these settings:

Video Renderer: VMR9
MPEG2 Decoder: Default
Audio Renderer: Default Directsound Device
Mpeg2 Audio Decoder: I have AC3filter specified

I use these for both Video/Audio and DVD playback and it gets rid of that blocky stuttering crap on the 4 6150 based clients I have.

I'm also using Java 1.42.11

[Mahoney]

Thanks, bhyman1, I'll give it a go. Are you sure PureVideo is the default MPEG2 decoder on your boxes? I'd be interested to see a GraphEdit output from your system so I can make sure my defaults are the same as yours!

[emok]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

Yes, I saw that. I've had this problem right from the start; I'm running Java 5.06, so that's not the issue. Have you tried many different ForceWare/PureVideo combinations? Interesting that it cropped up later, could be a software change you made or maybe as you say the motherboard was damaged by heat later on. But you say it goes away after a Sage standby? I'll give that a go.

Thanks for the reply.

I have tried different Forceware/Purevideo combinations. I saw this with the 80 series drivers as well as the .196 purevideo decoder. I'm now running 91.31/.223 and I still see it.

I've played around with the Audio/Video settings in sage as well, with no luck. I'll try bhyman1's suggestions as well, though I think I've tried various combinations.

NOT RELATED: I was actually having a lot of problems with ac3filter and trying to get audio rendered correctly this weekend and was doing a bunch of tweaking of the audio subsystem. I actually was unable to ac3 filter to decode ALL of my content correctly (SD mpegs/ HD mpegs with ac3 / DVD with AC3) as some would work and others would freeze. I ended up uninstalling ac3filter and was again having problems getting my audio content to play through the purevideo decoder. Eventually, I found that when installing sgraphedit, it registers the iviaudio.ax component, which seems to take precedence over the purevideo decoder. After unregistering that (regsvr32 /u iviaudio.ax) I'm no longer having audio issues.

[bhyman1]

I used the Win XP Decoder Checker utility from MS to make sure that Purevideo was the default mpeg-2 decoder. The only other codec I have installed is ffdshow, but RAW Video is disabled for that.

Oh, also, I'm not using FSE.

[Mahoney]

Well, I've ended up just setting everything to default! Probably means it's using VMR7 rather than VMR9 (it's definitely using a VMR, the PureVideo property page says so). Looks great to me, so I'll stick with it. 3D acceleration, but no FSE.

CPU utilization is a bit odd - it starts at minimal (<10%) and climbs steadily up to 100% before dropping down to minimal again and repeating ad nauseam. If it were a memory graph I'd understand, it would be a classic case of garbage collection peridically kicking in - but CPU? Seems very odd!

[tbonessc]

I've figured out one way to trigger this problem with my MSI 6150.
If I have FSE + VMR9 enabled playback is fine. If I disable FSE, but leave VMR9 on, I get the the stuck grid/frame within seconds.
I did have to restart sagetv with each change for the behavior to change. I don't know if that is normal for setting the FSE option.

[bhyman1]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

Well, I've ended up just setting everything to default! Probably means it's using VMR7 rather than VMR9 (it's definitely using a VMR, the PureVideo property page says so). Looks great to me, so I'll stick with it. 3D acceleration, but no FSE.

CPU utilization is a bit odd - it starts at minimal (<10%) and climbs steadily up to 100% before dropping down to minimal again and repeating ad nauseam. If it were a memory graph I'd understand, it would be a classic case of garbage collection peridically kicking in - but CPU? Seems very odd!

If Purevideo is set to VMR9 it'll use it. Have you tried setting VMR9 in Sage?

[emok]

Originally Posted by tbonessc

I've figured out one way to trigger this problem with my MSI 6150.
If I have FSE + VMR9 enabled playback is fine. If I disable FSE, but leave VMR9 on, I get the the stuck grid/frame within seconds.
I did have to restart sagetv with each change for the behavior to change. I don't know if that is normal for setting the FSE option.

I get this problem with VMR9 + FSE enabled, too. ALTHOUGH, what I said in my previous post about "NOT RELATED" seems to have helped my issue.

After fiddling with some sound decoder issues I was having, I didn't see the issue at all yesterday with some limited watching. I'll keep you guys posted after some more watching today.

The fact that putting Sage to standby and coming back out would fix it *most* of the time is kind of odd and it does seem to point to something Sage/FSE/decoder related.

[Mahoney]

PureVideo is set to "prefer VMR9". With the Sage renderer set to VMR9 I get the corruption issue; with it set to Default it looks fine.

It may be linked to the odd behaviour of the PureVideo tray icon, which only works properly if the decoder is set to Default, it doesn't work properly if it is set to nVidia.

I've set both to default, and turned 3D acceleration on and FSE off. Running Sage in a window, the PureVideo properties open and say that they are doing DXVA video mixer rendering.

So perhaps I am getting full VMR9 behaviour - hope so! Anyway, that issue is now cleared up for me. Just need to work out why the CPU is doing its weird cycle now.

[emok]

scratch that, I observed the freeze frame problem tonight. hmmm

[emok]

After scouring google some more and trying a few more things to fix this problem, I came across this post:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...&&#post8085247

Falling back to the drivers included on MSI's website seem to have solved the issue for me... for now...

Althought that's not really a good solution, it seems to work...

Another thread with similar problems: http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/showthread.php?t=31139

[Mahoney]

Thanks emok. I will give it a go when I have my PSU back.

[emok]

If anyone's interested, the new NVIDIA graphics drivers have been released. I haven't tried them, but they MAY resolve the problems we've been seeing with 6150s. Maybe I'll give 'em a whirl this weekend.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_91.47.html

[emok]

If anyone with this motherboard is interested, the new nvidia (91.47) drivers did not solve the video corruption issue. Went back to the drivers MSI has posted on their support site (82.05).

[sivilya]

sorry to say, but having the same issue with my 6150 I simply switched to Overlay and that's it.

[kricker]

Originally Posted by emok

If anyone with this motherboard is interested, the new nvidia (91.47) drivers did not solve the video corruption issue. Went back to the drivers MSI has posted on their support site (82.05).

Is this still the case? I am having this issue now with the drivers currently on Nvidias site. I am using the ASUS AM2 6150 board.

[Mahoney]

I'm now using the MSI support site drivers and no longer have issues.