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Preface: I'm an XBMC newbie, don't have much Linux experience, but am fairly techincal in general.
So I'm trying to see if XBMC would be useful on an older piece of hardware that I picked up. The CPU is a P4 at 3.0Ghz and the video card is an ATI FireGL v3100. (It is an older PCIe card with 128 MB. Wikipedia says that the core is a Radeon X300 XT.) I suspect that this hardware should be fine with 720p and be iffy on 1080p. So I burned the Eden disc that I found here, fired it up, and the GUI is unusable. The mouse pointer moves in multi-second jumps. The system info seems to say that I have no GPU and that the CPU on the box is pegged at 100% all of the time.
I realize that this hardware is fairly old, but I'm sure that it can do better than 1 frame every few seconds. What a I doing wrong? Sorry if this is some sort of FAQ. If so, I would appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction.
Thanks in advance for any help!
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I was able to get reasonable UI speed from Geexbox, but the machine seems unable to be able to handle 1080p. It is close to usable, but it drop frames. I assume that a more modern GUI will bridge the difference. (Right?) If so, can someone please recommend a some cheap, older PCIe cards that would be a good fit here? I'm looking for very cheap and would likely want to buy something used from eBay and Craigslist. I'm not looking for anything beyond 1080p MKV playback at this point.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions!
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Thanks for the recommendation. Is any random GeForce 210 the recommended card these day for a cheap HTPC? Or are there a collection of these cards that I should look around and find the best deal amongst the bunch?
Also, are these cards able to off-load basically all of the processing from the CPU? Or will I hit other limitations that will max out the P4?
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Most of the 210s will be fine. I have a fanless Asus GT210 in one of my XBMC boxes, and it works great. It should be able to offload most HD content that's out there. The P4 should be able to handle and SD content that the 210 won't accelerate.
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Google is your friend. You'll never really learn anything if everyone spoon feeds you. Look up VDPAU on wiki and you'll find what's supported by each feature set and hardware rev.
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2012-06-06, 13:31
(This post was last modified: 2012-06-06, 13:32 by nonorider360.)
Before give up, and buy an other graphic card, you have to know that your product isn't supported by amd official driver (fglrx), they only support product newer than radeon hd2xxx
So your card is only supported by the open source driver (radeon), which are very slowly with stock installation because this is an old release of the radeon driver.
You can spend just few time to test with newer release, for that you have to log you in tty (press ctrl+alt+F1 to swith), or by ssh if you prefer, and then,
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install libgl1-glx-mesa-experimental
before that move, when you see the result of "glxinfo | grep render" command, you see that you have "direct rendering : yes" but on the line below you have "software rastering" . That's why you performance suffers.
By doing the previous manipulation, you will have a full hardware rastering.
