Just for reference/comparison I have:
- Sandy Bridge i5 2300 on an Gigabyte H67 MicroATX board
- 6gb memory
- SSD drive
- Win7 Home Prem. 64bit
- using Intel graphics (no discrete video card)
(edit) - also running XBMC 10.1
meridius Wrote:I am building a new system soon and was going to go for the i3 but does this problem hppen on the i5 as well ?
Yes, the h/w acceleration issue is there with the i5 as well. I built mine back in February and when I first fired it up I was like WTF! regarding the pixelation. Then diddled with the settings and flipped it to "software" and all was good. Didn't think much of it as to me h/w graphics acceleration is about handing off the video from the cpu to the discrete video card...but since the Sandy Bridge setup does it's video with the cpu...h/w acceleration would be the cpu anyway. So I just figured that was how it went with Sandy Bridge configs...
meridius Wrote:if it does and turning off HW acceleration would it handle high bitrates as some people said the i3 can not handle some high bitrates.
Yes, my i5 system is just fine running in "software" mode instead of DXVA h/w acceleration. No performance issues, no pixelation or macroblocking whatsoever on anything I've played on it for the past 6 months in SD or HD (and I have an extremely extensive media collection...LOL).
I just sampled a few 1080p BD rips (MKVs) playing through their heavy action scenes with lots of on screen activity and performance traces average about 12-15% cpu with the occassional momentary spike to 20% during these heavy action scenes (across 3 of the 4 cores, the 4th core is minimal 2% usage during the same period).
Note: All my HD content, I've ripped from my BD using Handbrake and such to smaller 6 - 15 Mbps bitrates (works for me, my eyes can't see the difference from the higher/native BD bitrates...LOL)...so I can't speak to the native higher bitrates (25Mbps+).
So for me, I've no issues whether the h/w acceleration problem gets worked out...it doesn't impact me at all. I'm actually glad the guy at my local computer store pointed out it was only $40 more for the i5 part versus the i3 (also with not much of an increase in heat he said)...'cause I was gonna get the i3...