Dual displays: huge performance penalty

[LGoosens]

Hi all,

I've recently acquired a professional 22" LaCie CRT monitor, which turns out to be not just great for photo/video color correction, but also for watching Naruto and Battlestar Galactica. But now I'm running into some problems with my new dual display setup (extended desktop).

Aside from Windows not playing fair with color profiles (ugh) and constantly forgetting the correct refresh rates and monitor placement whenever I change a setting, the setup makes for some even stranger side effects with other software.

The most annoying being:
VLC Player running very slow and being mostly unresponsive on either monitor,

• only when playing a video
• and only when using the Direct3D output module.

Of course, when playing video on both monitors, one would expect a performance penalty, but the weird thing is that this issue occurs even when the video window is, in its entirety, on one of both displays. Of course, actually using both of them with the clone filter only worsens the problem, up to the point of having to wait a minute for VLC to close. The issue only occurs when playing video files, not music files. The severity of the performance penalty *seems* to depend more on the codec used, than on the frame size, but that's just a guess.

VLC has always been running very smoothly, and it runs smoothly again as soon as I disable the other monitor in the Display applet of the Windows Control Panel. However, being more of a collector (hoarder?) than a scrapyard regular, I'd really love to keep my old 17" monitor running alongside the "new" 22" screen.

I'd also rather not revert to the DirectX (DirectDraw) output module, because it came with its own slew of problems (like a flickering full screen controller).

My setup is as follows:

• Pentium IV 2.66 GHz, 533 MHz FSB (Northwood)
• Some IBM Motherboard, probably with i865G chipset
• 1,5 GB of PC2700 DDR memory (4 seperate modules)
• nVidia GeForce FX5700LE video card with 128 MB RAM (ASUS V9570LE/TD to be precise)
• Windows XP Professional SP3
• VLC 1.1.7

I'm not sure whether the video card supports multiple overlays on multiple displays - it does seem to sport multiple Look-Up Tables though, given the fact that I can successfully apply different color profiles to both monitors, so why not multiple overlays? Just a wild guess, but could this have something to do with the video card giving up on overlays altogether because of the dual display setup? How do I check whether or not a video window actually uses an overlay?

Thanks in advance for any attempts to educate me more about the wondrous world of VLC and multiple display setups.

Regards,

Lennart Goosens.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Ok. First, change the colour space option in the nvidia driver configuration panel.

Try to deactivate overlay.

[LGoosens]

Hi,

thanks for your reply. I should have also mentioned the following:

• nVidia ForceWare (driver) version: 175.19 (released back in 2008)
• DirectX version 9.0c

Newer ForceWare versions, unfortunately, do not support this video card. This could explain why I am unable to find an option for changing the colour space, as well as deactivating overlays. Of course, it could also be me. Can you be a bit more specific?

On a side note, I'm also curious how changing any of the options you mentioned could improve performance.
Oh, and, I assume that by colour space you don't mean my display's profile, but one of the standardized editing spaces like sRGB or Adobe RGB?

Regards,
Lennart Goosens.