x264 decoding with GMA900 and possible cpu upgrade

I want to have my C100 act as a movie player machine when I get an HDTV, and it works great for xvid HD content. x264 content on the other hand pegs the sucker out. The GMA900 has hardware mpeg4 decoding, but is limited on the x264 stuff offloading it almost all to the CPU. For a quick comparison

720p xvid: 20-30% cpu
720p x264: 90-99% cpu

While it has a 1.6 celeron M, I dont know if a CPU upgrade is even going to help. Moving to something like the 730 or 740 pentium would be fine, but all benchmarks I have been running put the celeron m clock for clock right at the 730/740 level.

Since I dont really have a spare 730/740 on hand to test my movies on and know for sure, do you guys think the 400>533 bump in FSB, and double L2 cache would help out on this?

 

The L2 cache will help out.But it's much likely that the high amount of floating point operations will knock the CPU out cold again.Go and see the PureVideo HD thread in the graphics section and see the benchmarks they are really disturbing.

 

You might want to try CoreAVC, it will probably give you a better result than a CPU upgrade.

Your GMA does NOT have hardware MPEG-4 decoding.

 

It HAS to, or some magic that I dont know of is happening behind the scenes with it. Playing normal mpeg4 stuff on my desktop gets 5% or so (7600gt, 1.86 c2d), and on the laptop gets 1-2% (GMA900, 1.5 celeron m). Same drivers on both machines, using quicktime alternative with coreavc drivers.

 

Ok, pin modded the celeron m 1.6 to about 2.16 or so. Movies are playing *slightly* better, with the CPU staying around 80% where it used to be 99%. The only problem is high action where it still pegs up and chokes. Anything think a pentium M will do the job better?

EDIT: That idea does not look like it will do anything better. Just ran CpuMark on the pin-modded Celeron-M 1.6 to 2.16, and it came out at the exact 5883.8 score as the pin modded 725 P-M. Damn, looks like only xvid Hd movies off this laptop :-/

 

In my experience with HD feeds, my T7400 processor uses about 70-75% of it's resources when running with a 1080i feed compressed for OTA HDTV broadcast.

So yeah...wow you've gotten that far!

 

A part of me is also wondering if the 512MB of shared memory has anything to do with it, but only like 230 or is is actually used during movie watching

My T7400 T60 plays anything I can throw at it without going above 50%, but I dont really like the wear n tear idea on my main machine. Well, I also have a desktop an an Apple TV... maybe I am just being picky. Oh come on like you never bought crap like crazy. STOP LOOKING AT ME I AM NOT STRANGE