Part of Flash video's problem is rendering to a web page box as it does isn't very efficient apparently. HTML 5 video isn't much different. They can't use video output modes like overlay mixer, VMR or EVR like a video playback application does.

All those annoying Flash advertisements add up in memory consumption and CPU usage too. Especially if you pile on the browser tabs. It is amazing to me how much memory a web browser can consume to display a modern web page thanks to this nonsense.

d1stortion wrote:

Flash is generally more of a memory than CPU hog in my opinion. When no RAM is free and it has to load videos from swap file things grind to a halt, which is understandable ...

PIII with 768MB of RAM, no pagefile, playing youtube video:

See CPU usage always above 80% and touching the roof sometimes 😵 .

Meanwhile RAM usage doesn't reach 500MB, even though browser memory cache is enabled and there is a ramdisk working in the background.

Flash videos absolutely KILL a netbook. Even SD videos drop frames. Forget about HD 😀

swaaye wrote:

Part of Flash video's problem is rendering to a web page box as it does isn't very efficient apparently. HTML 5 video isn't much different. They can't use video output modes like overlay mixer, VMR or EVR like a video playback application does.

All those annoying Flash advertisements add up in memory consumption and CPU usage too. Especially if you pile on the browser tabs. It is amazing to me how much memory a web browser can consume to display a modern web page thanks to this nonsense.

Remember the "good ole' days" when advertisements were nothing but flashing GIF's? Pepperidge Farm remembers...

Just a couple of months ago my overclocked P3-S could handle Youtube in 480p fullscreen with only 70-85% CPU use. But then Adobe decided to limit hardware acceleration to DX10 GPUs...those bastards. My once mighty P3 is now limited to 360p windowed mode, and with plenty of screen tearing.

TELVM wrote:

Meanwhile RAM usage doesn't reach 500MB, even though browser memory cache is enabled and there is a ramdisk working in the background.

Yeah a Pentium III is simply not meant for the job... I thought it was obvious that I wasn't talking about CPUs that came out like 7 years before youtube became prevalent. Or even Atoms and such. You really need GPU acceleration to make it work on a gimpy netbook CPU.

Since we are talking about 32-bit applications here they will also be limited to 4GiB if large address aware. But I've seen Firefox swap like crazy far before that mark. On something like 2.6GB for the FF process it's already unusable even though enough RAM would be left. It's unbelievable how badly those browsers are designed... if they are such memory hogs they at least need some kind of periodical purge function. But maybe it's just me expecting too much from this time and era.

I have a netbook with an older Atom one core processor with W7 installed. Thank God it has got 2 GB of RAM. I think it's not that bad. I can even use Photoshop on it.

I have also seen some newer Atom models that are dual-core.

d1stortion wrote:

TELVM wrote:

Meanwhile RAM usage doesn't reach 500MB, even though browser memory cache is enabled and there is a ramdisk working in the background.

Yeah a Pentium III is simply not meant for the job... I thought it was obvious that I wasn't talking about CPUs that came out like 7 years before youtube became prevalent. Or even Atoms and such. You really need GPU acceleration to make it work on a gimpy netbook CPU.

Since we are talking about 32-bit applications here they will also be limited to 4GiB if large address aware. But I've seen Firefox swap like crazy far before that mark. On something like 2.6GB for the FF process it's already unusable even though enough RAM would be left. It's unbelievable how badly those browsers are designed... if they are such memory hogs they at least need some kind of periodical purge function. But maybe it's just me expecting too much from this time and era.

FireFox can be pretty bad, a lot of the current games barely use 2gb let alone pushing 3gb except for a few exceptions.

On the topic of Flash acceleration, I figured out how to get the Radeon 3000 series (and maybe 2000 too) to do full acceleration of rendering and decode. Catalyst 9.11 seemingly accidentally supports it on these chips. That is the one and only release with support. It was very helpful when I had a Athlon Neo subnote with a discrete Radeon 3410, making YouTube HD playable. It is a little flaky though in that acceleration can fail if you resize the video or change resolution too much during playback.

Note that the 3000 IGPs do have official support of these features in all drivers.

I just did the LinX test with the same settings as every other here on a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 Hyperthreaded machine with 1.5 GB RAM in our office. I was in a hurry and didn't make screenshots (will do so next time). This machine was not reinstalled since 2007 yet it got a score of slightly over a minute. That means it is about 10x faster than Atom N270 and 3x faster than a Pentium M. The system is still quite fast and snappy with Win XP SP3

Pentium 4, with the exception of Willamete, was a very powerful CPU. Maybe not as "efficient" as Athlon XP but still very good, and the P4 machine we have.is less noisy than my i7 875k I have at home. People on here are in love with "teh Tulliez Pentium 3", but it simply was not possible to clock it higher in 2000. Netburst had nothing to do with "Intel greed" and more with practicality.

I think what some may dislike about P4 is how the average buyer thought "higher clockspeed = better", which alone sold a lot of those P4 machines in a time where AMD was more than competitive...

Contrarily, I'm not sure if the "more cores = better" equation helps AMD a lot nowadays given that many know about Intel's processors being faster and more power efficient.

A Preshott @ 4.0 is more than six times faster than a Tualatin @ 1.6 :

It also draws double at idle (164W) than the Tualatin draws at full burner (85W) 🤣 .

It is better to play old games at maximum settings than new games on minimum. I had an OEM Geforce 6500 (complete POS, was using it on my only PC from 2006-2011, so I don't think I need explanations on budget hardware) when UT3 came out and I remember installing the demo right after it came out. It looked absolutely hideous on minmal settings while the card was still capable of running UT04 on high@1024x768, so it's obvious what I went for. On a related note, when UT04 came out IIRC I had a Kyro II and played the demo on minimal settings until the card burned out and showed only wireframes, but even that was more appealing than UT3@minimal.

You can get a GTX 460 used for 45 EUR which completely blows away a GT 640 that costs twice as much...

He actually runs them at medium-high settings. And I agree to disagree, I played Fallout 3 a few years on a 128 MB X1600 because it is an awesome game with tons of quests and a great setting and storyline. Maybe your dream is to run Quake 3 with 16x SSAA, but most people think otherwise. Plus, most modern games look far better on low than used to be the case a few years ago. And it is irrelevant, because as I said, he doesn't actually have to run them at low, why would he on an old 1366x768 monitor?

m1so wrote:

... XP 2800+ with GMA950...

One can have good time with GT640 but riddle me this.

Putas wrote:

m1so wrote:

... XP 2800+ with GMA950...

One can have good time with GT640 but riddle me this.

Yeah, it was awful. Brutally awful. I still liked going to the "cafe" (more like a place where teens could go on PCs), because it was the only way to play CS, Half Life and Warcraft 3 over LAN, with all the people in one room. Plus, we always loved making fun of the awful PCs there. One time, a CD has actually flown across the room from a malfunctioning DVD drive 🤣 .

Seriously anyone who compares a GT640 to an integrated graphics never played a game on an IGP in their life. Show me an IGP that runs Metro Last Light at everything on except SSAA at 35-85 fps and I'll show you ghosts and spirits and unicorns.

Also, AMD Bulldozer CPUs don't need "Windows 8 magic", http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-8 … nce,3289-3.html , the actual difference is minimal. And my friend actually has Windows 7 64-bit on it. Gamers always overblow tiny issues to "zomg this is shit" and on the other hand anything above average gets idolized. Voodoo 5 was an inefficient, loud piece of obsolete technology yet people include it in their "Year 2000" retro rigs yet shun Pentium 4 which was often a very good CPU. I for one, love every hardware, because I don't take anything for granted. Well, except for intel IGPs, kill them with fire!

Honestly, a Bulldozer CPU can get over 100 fps in Skyrim and over 60 fps in BF3 yet all people speak of it like the devil. Try playing software mode Quake on Cyrix 686 and you'll know whats fucking shit. Or ANYTHING with an Intel GMA or HD graphics.

Besides, it is a lie that old games will run on full on intel IGPs. San Andreas runs like shit on a notebook from 2012 with Intel HD graphics on full settings and that is at 1024x768.

hey hey hey, dirt 2 on low gets 12fps? what's that intel hd? because here I can run just fine at 30 fps on my hd 3000 with some things on medium, and there're alot of videos about it...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwa1wY0-BCg

but it's an old gpu, a hd4000 or newer would do much better than that, and they're "low end"
About windows 8, game performance is the same compared to 7, for me the only difference was that on windows 8 i could start the computer in 10 seconds 😳

I like nvidia/amd gpus, but think, years ago before intel hd, you couldn't play even games that were 8 years older thant the intel gma, and now see, an intel gpu running battlefield 4, that's a really big evolution...

Just for finish, amd is cheaper than intel yes, but remember that intel is not only core ix there're still some cool processors like pentium ivy bridges (up to 3GHz dual core) and they're not expencive 😀

m1so wrote:

Gamers always overblow tiny issues to "zomg this is shit" and on the other hand anything above average gets idolized.

Now I don't know if you're just trolling or what, but I think it's fair enough to currently call it a shit product if it can't even beat the predecessor CPU, Phenom II, consistently in games. What is so wrong about that equation? Or do you not expect an upgrade CPU with all new architecture to perform better in any way?

Right now I see that currently one of the few games where it performs adequately is Crysis 3, and even there a FX-4300 (Piledriver refresh, mind you) loses to a 965 BE with 400 MHz lower core clock.

I think Bulldozer is somewhat interesting when you have a program that actually uses 8 threads..... but otherwise not so much. Though what you also see is that people can't really tell that it is generally rather slow, because, well it's not that slow even if it is way behind Intel. Gamers are often GPU limited for example.

m1so wrote:

Yeah, it was awful. Brutally awful. I still liked going to the "cafe" (more like a place where teens could go on PCs), because i […]
Show full quote

Putas wrote:

m1so wrote:

... XP 2800+ with GMA950...

One can have good time with GT640 but riddle me this.

Yeah, it was awful. Brutally awful. I still liked going to the "cafe" (more like a place where teens could go on PCs), because it was the only way to play CS, Half Life and Warcraft 3 over LAN, with all the people in one room. Plus, we always loved making fun of the awful PCs there. One time, a CD has actually flown across the room from a malfunctioning DVD drive 🤣 .

Seriously anyone who compares a GT640 to an integrated graphics never played a game on an IGP in their life. Show me an IGP that runs Metro Last Light at everything on except SSAA at 35-85 fps and I'll show you ghosts and spirits and unicorns.

Also, AMD Bulldozer CPUs don't need "Windows 8 magic", http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-8 … nce,3289-3.html , the actual difference is minimal. And my friend actually has Windows 7 64-bit on it. Gamers always overblow tiny issues to "zomg this is shit" and on the other hand anything above average gets idolized. Voodoo 5 was an inefficient, loud piece of obsolete technology yet people include it in their "Year 2000" retro rigs yet shun Pentium 4 which was often a very good CPU. I for one, love every hardware, because I don't take anything for granted. Well, except for intel IGPs, kill them with fire!

Honestly, a Bulldozer CPU can get over 100 fps in Skyrim and over 60 fps in BF3 yet all people speak of it like the devil. Try playing software mode Quake on Cyrix 686 and you'll know whats fucking shit. Or ANYTHING with an Intel GMA or HD graphics.

Besides, it is a lie that old games will run on full on intel IGPs. San Andreas runs like shit on a notebook from 2012 with Intel HD graphics on full settings and that is at 1024x768.

I agree and had to re-learn a few lessons after my house burnt down losing everything that I had but I made the best of what I could get in the months after. Got by on a old Inspiron 9300 as it was all that I could afford to get started again and I can get by on a PM pretty well if it were not for the meager 2gb ram limit with the 915 chipset. Intel's igp is and has always been crap yet people are dumb enough now days to still be buying atom netbooks as well overpriced ultra thins. Oh well I find many cheap gems at prices cheaper than eBay when it comes to laptops, had to 🤣 when I snatched up a sony that had a i7-740qm for only $20 that turned up to be working minus a bunch of screws 😎 I know Europe it is getting to be like the 1930s again but very slowly.