Laggy YouTube HD videos on G73JH

[octiceps]

I don't know why, but for some reason playing more than one 1080p YouTube video simultaneously on my G73JH makes the videos lag like crazy. Playing a single 1080p video is fine, but as soon as I add another one both videos slow down dramatically. According to the performance monitoring in my Windows Task Manager, my CPU usage is around 15% while playing a single video, and adding in more videos after than actually reduces the usage to under 10%. Physical memory usage is around 40% throughout. I'm using FireFox with hardware acceleration enabled in Flash Player.

At first, I thought it was because my Internet connection was causing the slowdown. However, I let all the videos finish buffering and then tried again, but same deal. For comparison's sake, my friend's HP DV6, which has a Sandy Bridge i7-2630QM, can play up to 5 1080p YouTube videos before slowdowns happen. I know that the Sandy Bridges are faster, but they're not this much faster right???

Do any other owners of the G73JH with stock CPU want to test this out and see if you are experiencing the same thing?

[dstrakele]

Download DPC Latency Checker from the link in the OP of the "Drivers, Apps, and How-to's" thread, and follow the instructions on the download page discussing how to use the utility to troubleshoot latency.

Does your friend with the HP obtain that performance on your network?

What power profile are you using?

What version video driver are you running?

If you configure Firefox and Flash to use software acceleration, does it change behavior?

What WLAN adapter do you have? If Atheros, confirm your driver is version 9.2.1.432 or later. The earlier version shipped by ASUS has bad DPC Latency.

[octiceps]

dstrakele wrote:
Download DPC Latency Checker from the link in the OP of the "Drivers, Apps, and How-to's" thread, and follow the instructions on the download page discussing how to use the utility to troubleshoot latency.

Does your friend with the HP obtain that performance on your network?

What power profile are you using?

What version video driver are you running?

If you configure Firefox and Flash to use software acceleration, does it change behavior?

What WLAN adapter do you have? If Atheros, confirm your driver is version 9.2.1.432 or later. The earlier version shipped by ASUS has bad DPC Latency.

I know this is gonna sound silly, but I just started using Google Chrome for the first time and all of a sudden, I'm not having these lag issues on HD YouTube videos anymore! In fact, I can play 5 1080p videos back-to-back before the lag starts! From what I'm observing, the Adobe Flash plugin for FireFox seems like an enormous resource hog. Not only is YouTube not lagging anymore, but my overall browsing experience feels faster in Chrome as well. I've always been a FireFox user, but his latest incident may turn me over to regular Chrome user. 😉

[octiceps]

Well, after using Chrome for a bit, my lag is back with a vengeance. I've put my battery profile on high performance and PowerPlay is turned off, but those don't help at all. On AC power as well.

However, I did notice, according to RealTemp, that my CPU speed stays around 1.3 GHz with ~12% usage while playing 1 video. Playing more than 1 video drops the CPU speed down to 1.1 Ghz and <10% load. Is there a way to make my CPU work at its rated speed (1.73 GHz) to hopefully get rid of this lag? Is this a sign that my CPU is throttling?

[fuzon1337]

Hi

How is it with the lates drivers for your notebook?
(Intel, AMD/ATI, and one important one, Atheros WiFi card (if you got that card in your notebook))

fuzon1337 wrote:

Have you tried to do a vBIOS update to see if that changes your issue?
Also you could check out this site
[Note: you need to flash your BIOS to 211 or newer to get full support of the vBIOS update]
BIOS update guide tutorial
Or you can follow these steps:

JRd1st wrote:

The Safer Method to Flash a System BIOS

1. Format a USB drive to FAT32 format.
2. Download the new BIOS and unzip it to the USB drive.
3. Remove USB drive after you're certain the file transfer is complete.
4. Restart your notebook and while the ASUS logo is on the screen press F2 or del a few times to enter the BIOS setup.
5. Find the Easy Flash Utility and insert the USB drive. Tell Easy flash where your BIOS file is then follow directions explicitely!!!
6. When your notebook restarts, enter the BIOS Setup utility again and select "Load Optimized Defaults" (I think it's f9 )
7. Save and Exit, then continue into Windows.

Or you can try out CCleaner and run Register to check for some junk that is left behind when you have uninstalled programs, that can cause problems.

[octiceps]

fuzon1337 wrote:
Hi

How is it with the lates drivers for your notebook?
(Intel, AMD/ATI, and one important one, Atheros WiFi card (if you got that card in your notebook))



Or you can try out CCleaner and run Register to check for some junk that is left behind when you have uninstalled programs, that can cause problems.

I'm already on BIOS 213 and vBIOS 93. Tried newest drivers too. Not a lick of difference. Just wondering, could anyone else try playing more than one 1080p YouTube video simultaneously and report back your result? I'm wondering if I'm the only one experiencing this.

[octiceps]

Alright, after some further testing, I've FINALLY figured out the source of my laggy playback in YouTube. What I did was I found 4 different videos of Battlefield 3 gameplay that were uploaded by a user who originally recorded in FHD+ (1920x1200). Since YouTube automatically scales down videos larger than FHD (1920x1080) to different quality levels defined as 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p, and 240p, I was able to test these 4 videos at both their original resolution (1920x1200) and YouTube's scaled down 1080p. What I found was that playing more than one video at YouTube's 1080p quality really throttled down my CPU, hence reducing performance in all videos. In fact, playing more than one video made everything respond sluggishly on my computer. This is what my CPU load and speed looks like when playing the 4 videos at 1080p:



As you can see the load is under 10% and the actual clock speed is much lower than my CPU's rated speed. Everything I do responds sluggishly at this point.

Now, when I playback the 4 videos at their original quality, my CPU load immediately amps up and so does the clock frequency:



In this instance, the frequency is at around 1.85 GHz, and Turbo Boost occasionally bumps that up to 2.5 GHz+. The load is around 60%, which seems about right for the demands that are being placed on the CPU with 4 FHD+ videos running simultaneously in a web browser. Despite the fact that each video is now played back at a higher quality setting, they run much smoother and my computer is still very fast and responsive.

Now, I have no idea why my CPU underperforms at the 1080p quality setting in YouTube. It could possibly be an issue with Adobe Flash Player or the codecs, but I'm just guessing. YouTube playback at HD quality seems to be completely CPU dependent as my GPU load stayed around 1-2% regardless of how many videos were running at the same time. And of course hardware acceleration in Flash Player was enabled the entire time.