[luminarycrush]

I installed XMBC 10.0 on my HTPC box - an ASUS Digimatrix, 2.66GHz P4, 2G PC2700 RAM. This same hardware runs MythTV just fine (was running MythTV on Fedora 12), but for some reason XBMC is impossibly slow and completely unusable.

Each keyboard click has a 2-4 second delay before any action on the screen, and the mouse movements are similar.

In dmesg I'm seeing lots of errors about unknown symbol in saa7134_alsa:

[ 13.996116] saa7134_alsa: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_add

But nothing else jumps out as unusual. Something is mis-behaving...unless XMBC 10.0 is just that much of a pig?

So, looking at X, the system is defaulting to 1600x1200 resolution.. the onboard video does indeed support that max resolution (SIS 301C) but that's probably pushing it. I manually reduced the resolution to 1360x768. This makes it 'less sluggish' but it's still not usable & the CPU is still pegged.

Any thoughts?

[topfs2]

XBMC uses OpenGL and the GPU to render the interface, your GPU is way to slow to handle it.
EDIT: You probably don't even use the GPU for it but even if you could that chip is to old

You need to either keep mythtv or upgrade your GPU (and install drivers).

Cheers,
Tobias

[luminarycrush]

The box is a set-top form factor - no expansion slots aside from internal mini-PCI (which wouldn't help in this case).

Argh... is there no way to set a different render mode in XBMC for the interface?

[darkscout]

The box is a set-top form factor - no expansion slots aside from internal mini-PCI (which wouldn't help in this case).

Argh... is there no way to set a different render mode in XBMC for the interface?

MiniPCI or MiniPCI Express? The latter you can add a Crystal HD chip.

[luminarycrush]

Not Express - just MiniPCI. This is a pre-MiniPCIExpress box.

The only MiniPCI video card I've seen is:

ATI Rage XL mini-PCI Video Card
http://www.alancomputech.com/71p8487.html

But, even if I added this card, how would I connect electrically to the external VGA/DVI ports? I can't ... and there's no where really to put additional connectors without some major hacking.

[topfs2]

MiniPCI or MiniPCI Express? The latter you can add a Crystal HD chip.

Will not help with GUI rendering.

Argh... is there no way to set a different render mode in XBMC for the interface?

No, XBMC is extremely heavy to render and what you are seeing is CPU only rendering. And as you clearly can see, CPU only rendering is not enough. Nothing we can change.