Serious problem with HD6850 OC edition

[Mazari]

Heya!

I have serious problem with Gigabyte HD6850 OC edition from the very moment i  bought it in december 2010.

whenever i have some movie in the background like on youtube or even simple animated banners on some www site my FPS in games drastically drops.
I have first noticed that when playing WoW Cataclysm half year ago. I was happily playing with my 100-120 fps when i decided to play some music on youtube. Lo and behold, suddenly my fps dropped to 4 FPS !.

This happens with any projected video regardless whether its in media player classic, youtube, windows media player, winamp or others. No ammount of drivers [newer or older] helped.

Is my GFX somehow defective or what ?

Ever since it happend i curse myself for choosing kh6850 instead of gtx460 :<.


Please help.

[Hovis]

Hi Mazari.

Many modern media players will use the GPU to accelerate video decoding, this would then subtract FPS from your games as the GPU is being used somewhere else as well.

For youtube videos, pick any video and right click on it and select "Settings...". Under the first tab you will see a tick box titled "Enable hardware acceleration." If you have this ticked the video will be decoded with your HD6850, if you have it un-ticked the decoding will be tasked to your CPU, which is what you want! So make sure that option is un-ticked.

For other media players have a look in the options and see if there is a similar thing like "Enable hardware acceleration" or "Enable GPU decoding"... something like that. You'll want to make sure that that option is disabled so the videos are tasked to your CPU and not your HD6850. This should hopefully boost your fps in games.

I hope this helps,

Hovis.

Edit: Another couple of things, could you please post your system specification (i.e. CPU, RAM and motherboard) and which games you notice a severe drop in FPS.

WoW is known to be more dependant on your CPU than your GPU, so if you are using a browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer that uses a lot of RAM and CPU even to display simple flash advertisements this could be the cause as well - Too much CPU usage instead of the GPU being overloaded.

Try downloading Google Chrome and see if the problem persists. Try Youtube videos with Hardware acceleration both disabled and enabled.

Please do some testing then post your results here along with your system specification, games that are effected and browser/programs used.

Sorry for the long post but I think this is more a software issue than the HD6850 being defective.

[Mazari]

I'll try this once i get home. It is surprising nevertheless that it can be as heavy hit as 120 fps to 4 fps which is quite..... enormous. Is there some setting maybe in windows 7 options to turn it off?

Previously i was using 9800gts asus and win xp and never had such prob. I changed entire comp and am running win 7 64 and hd6850 as mentioned and maybe there's some default setup set for hardware acceleration ?

Either way thanks for help ill definitly check in home if it works with youtube vids while playing. If it does then it means this is the case, if not... then i'll need to ponder about it some more.

[Hovis]

To be honest it could be several things. If you have windows 7 features like Aero and a looping desktop background (i.e. that changes every 10 seconds) that can have a small impact, but shouldn't be too much. I don't know of any dedicated setting within Windows 7, but you can have a look here:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11728-optimize-windows-7-a.html

And see if there is anything you think is worth changing.

Also when does it drop from 120fps to 4fps? And in which games? Is it always as soon as you start a video? Playing a video while playing a game is going to slow your game down, but it is strange that it is by so much.

Please have a look at what I said in the my first post and do what is there first,

Hovis.

[Mazari]

FPS drops in every single game i play whether old or new as long as i have vid in the background running even if its something very small and short.

I don't use fancy stuff in win7, same background theme without changing etc. And performance drop is so sever it's barely playable. For some reason gpu takes 100% power on that vids.

[Mazari]

Ok so i have tried it again with "hardware acceleration" off.

Youtube vid and witcher 2.

1) video paused (not playing) just sitting there in the background but besides that nothing
2) witcher 2 has 10 FPS
3) video tab with youtube vid closed
4) witcher 40-45 FPS

Why is it happening? Video wasn't even playing it was just there sitting on stop.

Anyone from gigabyte tech support? I dunno if i should return the card for defect-free one or something.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

You haven't actually told us what setup you have hardware wise. Some other card or whatever could be having a bearing on what is happening.

[Badbonji]

Maybe your card is going into 2d clock speed because of it getting confused from the video playing. Get MSI Afterburner then see what happens to the core and shader clock speeds (it shows them on the monitoring graphs) whilst you play the game with the video. If you notice them drop then that might be the problem.

[Mazari]

I'll do that when i'm home.

As for hardware can't say it from memory but some of it is; i5-760, 4gb ram 1333 i believe, hd6850 oc, PSU is ~600W chieftec,

I'll see with afterburner what happens as you've said and then reply here.

[Dark Mantis]

Are you using the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Windows 7 ?

[Mazari]

64 bit, drivers are also for 64 edition

[Dark Mantis]

Well that will enable you to use the full 4GB of memory that you have installed then but it is not a huge amount by today's standard.

[Hovis]

What browser are you using?

Have you tried Google Chrome?

Firefox used to slow my games down when I had it opened on a Youtube.

[Mazari]

it doesn't matter. IT happens [as i've said] regardless of where the vid is played. It can be played even in media player classis. Hell it can just be opened in MPC but not be playing and the result is same.

[Mazari]

Still having problems. Still getting slow downs with any vid even on pause in the background.

Also certain filed in full HD tear lag or generally stop playing. sometimes they play totally fine.

Got no viruses, no other unneeded programs etc.

I'm seriously thinking of turning it in since i still got warranty. I hoped i could get some answer or help from tech support here maybe but i dont think itll happen.