[polys]

Hello,

I purchased an Acer Revo RL70 with the following specs:

- AMD E450 1.65GHz
- 4GB RAM + 640GB HDD
- AMD Radeon HD 6320

It came with Linux on it so I installed W7 Ultimate 64 bit and then installed XBMC.

I tried Confluence and then AEON MQ3 (which I know is heavier than other skins) and they were both very laggy during menu navigation, especially in the movies menu. For AEON MQ3 I was using the Showcase view. You can see the log below running MQ3. I run XBMC, went to Movies and started scrolling to the right. The CPU usage reached 100% during that time.

http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=2968

Also in the main menu, without doing anything, it was consuming 50% CPU. Is that normal?

Thanks in advance

[Ned Scott]

Normal. XBMC will render the GUI over and over again due to how things worked on it long ago. Dirty regions (wiki) is a feature/setting that should improve this and lower CPU and GPU usage, and make the GUI more responsive. It's not on by default since it acts odd on some systems, but it won't hurt anything to try it out. In most cases it will work great.

[polys]

Hi Ned and thanks for your reply.

I used to run XBMC on my laptop which is a more powerful machine than my Revo. My worry is that this problem was because of the E-450 APU. You 're saying that the E-450 is fine with XBMC and I would notice the same CPU usage on an ION machine?

Also when using Aeon MQ3, I noticed in the logs that I posted in my original post that for some thumbnails, it takes 1+ second to retrieve them. And because of the nature of the "Showcase" view, where 10 thumbnails are shown every time (left and right of the currently selected movie), I can sometimes see the same thumbnail on 5-6 of the movies when scrolling and only when i stop scrolling the correct thumbnail is loaded. Is there a way to improve this?

[arnova]

I'm pretty sure it has to do with your video driver. Did you install the latest fglrx driver from AMD? You could also try enabling/disabling vsync in the system video settings...

[bluray]

You can install the latest AMD driver from here- AMD Driver Autodetect......you can try to set it to "High Performance" power option in Windows 7 control panel too......

[LeeG]

Try un-checking "Run in full screen window rather than true fullscreen" in Settings>System>Video Output

[polys]

Thanks for the replies. I installed OpenElec to give that a go and compare against the W7.

@bluray I did install the latest AMD drivers with the driver autodetect but hadn't set it to high performance.
@arnova what are the fglrx drivers? I read somewhere that performance would be better if vsync was enabled
@LeeG I think it's slightly better with full screen window enabled. Or i might be wrong.

So someone has tried the E-450 and it's fine with a heavy skin like AEON MQ3? No lag when loading the thumbnails?

[arnova]

Thanks for the replies. I installed OpenElec to give that a go and compare against the W7.

@bluray I did install the latest AMD drivers with the driver autodetect but hadn't set it to high performance.
@arnova what are the fglrx drivers? I read somewhere that performance would be better if vsync was enabled
@LeeG I think it's slightly better with full screen window enabled. Or i might be wrong.

So someone has tried the E-450 and it's fine with a heavy skin like AEON MQ3? No lag when loading the thumbnails?

Sorry, I misread your post, I thought you were running Linux which uses fglrx for AMD GPUs. But for Windows this is not relevant. Whether vsync improves performance (or NOT!) is hard to tell upfront. Only trail and error will reveil that...