Performance Issues

GPU vs CPU - Which is it using?

from WinCustomize Forums
I recently purchased and am currently using Deskscapes, but I've been left a little puzzled over something recently. When I use any of my .dream files as my background, my CPU usage jumps up about 20%. Granted, I have a fast computer, and this isn't too huge of a problem, but it's a bit disconcerting when it was my understanding that the program would be utilizing the GPU. Is there something wrong here? Is there a way to change this? Or is this just normal?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
6,821 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
It depends on the encoding of the dream itself. I believe wmv dreams use more CPU than mpg dreams do.
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Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Since it uses whatever video codecs installed to play the videos you need to have a codec that uses your GPU. Nvidia has there purevideo codec for mpeg2 playback, but doesn't run on every card.
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Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
So obviously, you have Windows Vista.

I downloaded ALL of the current codecs at Softpedia.com WWW Link

That should do the trick.

P.S. your computer will use your ram on your graphics card first, then when no more is available it will start borrowing some ram from your cpu.

Hope this helps.
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Awesome. I'm going to go ahead and download the codecs, and hopefully this will help. As it is right now, it looks like it's using CPU first. This had initially seemed fishy to me, as a computer with 4GB of RAM really shouldn't be having the CPU usage jump up 20% from a program that supposedly uses the CPU minimally. I'll give the link a shot. Thanks.
Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Well, crap. This really didn't fix anything. My CPU usage is still hovering around 35% with the background on.
Reply #9 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Video dreams require something to decompress the video. That is what the codecs do. WMV video require more CPU to decompress the video that MPEG2 because WMV is compressed more.

Having more ram only prevents having to load the video from your hard drive again on the second loop, but each uncompressed frame is not saved into ram to be played again, it has to be decompressed again. That is why so the CPU load does not change after the first loop.

Bottom line is that if you use a video dream, the codec needs to be written to use any hardware you have. That is why nvidia has there own codec from mpeg2. Not sure what ATI has, but I' sure they have something.

If video dreams run poorly on your PC, you may have to stick with the dynamic ones that are not a video but an program.

Also, having a dual core does not help if the codec isn't written to use multiple cores.

Maybe you can try Cyberlink's codec if they have a demo version to see if a commercial MPEG2 decoder would help.