Standard DVD-Video playback under PowerDVD XP/4.0, which is easily the fastest version of the software. Because most video playback under WinXP is done with a video overlay, PrintScreen does not capture the video window, so I also took pictures of the system with a camera.

Here's what my camera saw:

YouTube performance

With hardware accelerated rendering provided by the Radeon 9800 Pro, it's entirely possible to enjoy full screen 480p YouTube video on a PIII system:

Even 720p runs at 16fps!

720p H.264 (DirectShow) performance:

Playing a 720p, x264 encoded episode of the big bang theory. I missed it on cable that day and I'm too cheap to buy a DVR. CPU usage hit 100% a few times, but I didn't notice any frames being dropped. Again, MS Paint does not capture video overlay under WinXP.

Here's what my camera saw:

WMV-HD playback

ATI's Pixel Shader 2.0 assisted WMV-HD playback is just incredible. With this kind of performance, I'm sure that even a 1GHz Coppermine would be able to handle 720p WMV-HD. I use PowerDVD XP for WMV playback because it's a little more efficient than MPC-HC and WMP11.

And here's what my camera saw:

Standard Def Steve wrote:

YouTube performance

With hardware accelerated rendering provided by the Radeon 9800 Pro, it's entirely possible to enjoy full screen 480p YouTube video on a PIII system:

That's not worse than on my modern machine. I hate Youtube, the more windows are open the more frames it drops.

how do you get the video card hardware rendering? is it possible to do with newer cards on Pentium 4?

The best option for AGP should be a Radeon HD4650.
HD4630 and HD4670 should be as good for that purpose. HD4670 is probably overkill. HD4630 runs cooler/more quiet but (talking AGP) is not as easily to find, not really cheaper, and not as fast in 3D.

Still I'd be interested in hardware acceleration for older cards since I have a machine with a Tualeron 1.0A@1.33GHz and a Radeon 9600. Would that be sufficient?

But but but flash and HD stuff didn't exist at that time yet 😀 So I wouldn't worry too much about all of this!

there is an HD3850 which might be a little faster than the 4650 possibly faster than the 4670.

cdoublejj wrote:

how do you get the video card hardware rendering? is it possible to do with newer cards on Pentium 4?

Not too sure about NVidia, but all DX9 ATI cards (Radeon 9500 and up) can help with Flash video rendering starting with catalyst 6.2. I'd recommend Cat7.3 for Radeon 9500-9800 and X300-800 cards. Despite being a newer driver geared towards x1900 cards, it actually manages to outperform 6.x drivers on older R350-class hardware as well.

Keep in mind that these older video cards don't actually decode the video bitstream; that task is performed by the processor. These cards will only assist in painting the decoded video frames on screen. Still, this partial hardware acceleration helps tremendously with the inefficient Flash player.

For full hardware Flash playback (rendering and bitstream decoding), you'd need a Radeon HD card.

idspispopd wrote:

The best option for AGP should be a Radeon HD4650.
HD4630 and HD4670 should be as good for that purpose. HD4670 is probably overkill. HD4630 runs cooler/more quiet but (talking AGP) is not as easily to find, not really cheaper, and not as fast in 3D.

Still I'd be interested in hardware acceleration for older cards since I have a machine with a Tualeron 1.0A@1.33GHz and a Radeon 9600. Would that be sufficient?

I think I read somewhere here on Vogons that SSE2 is required to take advantage of the H.264 bitstream decoder found in Radeon HD cards. So you'd need an Athlon 64 or P4 processor.

Besides, I wouldn't recommend an AGP 3850 or 4650 series card for an older platform. They seem to add quite a bit more CPU overhead than the older Radeon 9500-9800 cards.

Your 9600 would be capable of the same partial hardware video acceleration as my 9800 Pro. With a Tualeron 1.33, you'd probably be able to get away with 720p WMV-HD, 480p DirectShow H.264, and maybe 480p full screen youtube.

I have that same proc and motherboard, they work quite well. I haven't ever tried overclocking it, but I run win98SE or win2k on it, and I have a voodoo 5500 in it, also a SB Live. I use it for older games tho... =]

I've added an hd2600(xt?) to an OCed p4 (9xxmhz FSB) at 1.7v it runs okay ish does okay with YT and can JUST handle one of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. not sure which one. (I think it's the second game). GTA SA runs smooth. I also have 1TB drive hooked to it and it does okay also am considering getting a cheap or free SSD and ghosting over the OS drive.

Would be WAAAAYYY better if it was a Barton core instead of a P4 but, who knows if my god parents give me their Barton core maybe i can combine both machines.

The problem with Barton is that it doesn't support SSE2. It wouldn't be able to take advantage of your card's hardware MPEG4-AVC decoder. A P4 with a 9xxMHz FSB should be faster than an Athlon XP in games, too.

that's true how ever not to many years ago i built Barton core with an nvidia 6k series and it ran aero and flash and YouTube just fine, even at the same time. It does make me wonder how well a Barton core would do though yet it though it doesn't have SSE 3 which is probably the only reason it can JUST handle some of the newer games i put on it. as it sits with the p4 it has it runs YT rather well for it's age. i'd like to try new games but, i need to get a new water pump res combo unit and figure out what cause the black stuff (copper oxide).

So I tried running a few tests with an evga 7800GS AGP yesterday. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work properly, even at AGP 2x. Most of the games I tried were missing textures, and a few of them would just crash to the desktop. 2D applications were OK, though screen redraws definitely seemed a little slower than the 9800 Pro.

I also threw in one of my spare HDDs and installed Win7 to see how it would run on an older system with a WDDM-capable graphics card.

Performance was actually quite good, all things considered. Web pages seemed to load a little faster under Win7 than they did on XP. However, browser scrolling was quite choppy. I'm not sure if it was a lack of CPU power that was causing the choppiness, or if it was some conflict between the graphics card and VIA AGP controller. Everything else worked well.

Here's the WEI score:

Edit: It's surprising how close a 1585MHz PIII is to a hyper-threaded 1833MHz Atom in Win7's CPU score:

One of the things that sold my boss on windows 7 was when a customer brought in a Pentium 3 with 512mb ram running windows 7. It was up and booted and on a web page in a few minutes. windows 7 is very capable of scaling down specially if you turn off aero and extra unneeded system services.

Obviously the lowest ram usage i have seen on it with A/V was 350-400mb where as xp is usually 130-256mb.

Would be interesting to 7 on dual tualatin 1.4 with a decent card a like an agp 4/8x hd2600 or nvidia 7300/7800.

cdoublejj wrote:

Would be interesting to 7 on dual tualatin 1.4 with a decent card a like an agp 4/8x hd2600 or nvidia 7300/7800.

I had a dual 1.26 PIII box at one point in time, but I was never really impressed by its performance. A few applications took advantage of the second CPU, but SMP never gave that machine the boost I thought it would. Single-threaded performance was always a little lower than that of a single-P3 board. I believe that a lack of memory/bus bandwidth is what hampered that rig's performance. Unfortunately, I couldn't overclock it.

The thing about the P3 is that its performance just skyrockets when you add a little FSB speed and CL2 memory. At 1.4/133/CL3, performance was nothing to write home about, but the overclocked FSB and aggressive memory timings really seemed to wake it up.

At 1596/152/CL2, CPU-bound gaming performance on this P3 is better than the Athlon XP 2000+ it replaced. Although, it probably didn't help the Athlon that it was stuck on a lame ECS board with PC133 memory.

For HD - Blu-ray (rip) playback, I would suggest install only The KMPlayer 3.0.0.1442 (or latest build - I didn't check for updates in the last few months), and then, integrate CoreAVC Professional Edition v3.0.1.0 as an external video decoder for H.264 and AVC1.

CoreAVC is arguably the best software HD-decoder, no wonder that it's not freeware - but in the age of torrents, this shouldn't be a problem. You use an older version, so I guess you know this already.

This combo will play EVERYTHING. I mean, EVERYTHING (from blurry 320x240 *.mpegs, *.flvs and *.ogms to 10,000 kbps 1080p Hi10p *.mkvs with 5.1 FLAC audio). With less CPU-consumption than anything else out there.
The player itself is very customizable and has a nice GUI.

My results with this:

Intel P4 3.0 GHz HT (NW) + 1 GB RAM + Radeon X1300 PRO 256 MB AGP ---> I was able to play LAGLESS 1080p HD if it's not with FLAC audio and video bitrate is not over 4500 kbps. MUCH better results with HD 3850 AGP, but that's to be expected.

Intel Celeron D 2.4 GHz + 512 MB RAM + Radeon 9200 64 MB ---> I was able to play ANY 720p HD *.mkv without any lag, if video bitrate is not over 3500 kbps and not with oversampled FLAC audio.

Intel Pentium III 733 + 384 MB RAM + Riva TNT2 16 MB Vanta (!) + Win XP ---> I was able to play H.264 coded 480p *.mkv (!) with a minimal lag sometimes. It was enjoyable.

Everything is fullscreen of course, tested file formats including *.mkv too.

I'm an anime collector, from the serious type : ) (got 2,5 TB already + some live action classics - the only limit for my ever-expanding collection is the lacking of additional HDDs at the moment).
I've spent nearly 6 months to experiment with different players and codecs and reading a bit into the topic in order to find my Holy Grail. With this amount of video files, you can imagine how variously coded releases can be found on my HDDs - I was in a desperate need of a universal tool for all of them. Back in the days, my PC wasn't too modern either, so I had serious lags (with high-quality HD-releases) with "faulty" players and codecs so I was basically forced to find the ideal solution. The KMPlayer and CoreAVC is the result of this exploring.

This may be just a wall of irrevelant text for you, but I'm trying to help to improve your rig's video playback performance. If you take the effort to try it out, don't hesitate to share your experiences and opinion here. I'd like to see how a nicely equipped P III deals with true 720p H.264 / x.264 *.mkvs.

QlShdR wrote:

This may be just a wall of irrevelant text for you, but I'm trying to help to improve your rig's video playback performance. If you take the effort to try it out, don't hesitate to share your experiences and opinion here. I'd like to see how a nicely equipped P III deals with true 720p H.264 / x.264 *.mkvs.

Not at all irrevelant! it's nice to see how my old P3 stacks up against other machines when it comes to video playback. 😀

This machine can already play my 720p MKVs just fine, even under WMP11. I posted a few screenshots above under "720p directshow performance". The 720p MKVs I watch are mostly TV shows downloaded from the net. I'm not sure about the bitrate, but most of them are 22 minutes long and have a file size of 550-700MB. The PIII has no problem with any of them. CPU usage usually bounces around 75-95% during playback, occasionally hitting 100%, but never lagging.

I'll definitely give KMPlayer a try. Anything that can lower CPU usage is definitely welcome!