Greetings fellow UMPC fans. I joined the UMPC test team this year and have had the opportunity to play with many different UMPC systems. As a test guy, I can never leave well enough alone, and am always tearing things apart to see how they work, and pushing them to their limit. My friends have learned to be cautious about what they give me to “play with,” because it just may not come back in the same condition.
I have been spoiled with big high powered desktop PCs for quite some time now, so it was a bit of a shift for me to start working with UMPCs. I found that my applications do not always run as fast or as smoothly. I realize UMPC devices are pushing the hardware and software design limits because of size and battery constraints, but after using it a while, I am now hooked on the size, and don’t want that to change much (if any) to increase the performance or visual look and feel.
I noticed that some of the UMPC systems had a choppy animation experience and poor video playback with the pictures stopping and sound not synchronized with the image. So I decided to do some playing around to see if I could get my video playback to run a little smoother. I tried installing the latest graphics drivers, but there seemed to be no change.
Next I decided to turn off hardware acceleration to see if the issue was with the graphics driver. I found an article from the MSDN library that talked about disabling Graphics Hardware Acceleration http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970912.aspx#disablehardwareacceleration and decided to give it a try. I rebooted the UMPC after performing the steps, and tried playing back my video. The video skipped a bit as it was initially loading then became smooth and in synch with the audio. I was thrilled! The downside was my CPU was now using most of my CPU to do all of the graphics work. So when I tried running another application with the video playing, both the video and the application struggled to run. Granted, not a perfect solution, but one where I can now watch my videos at full screen.
In the mean time I have sent mail off to the various hardware providers and waiting for the updates to come out.
Here is the specific section I followed from the MSDN article:
Disable Hardware Acceleration Option
|
Registry key |
Value type |
|
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsof\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration |
DWORD |
The disable hardware acceleration option enables you to turn off hardware acceleration for debugging and test purposes. When you see rendering artifacts in a application, try turning off hardware acceleration. If the artifact disappears, the problem might be with your video driver.
The disable hardware acceleration option is a DWORD value that is either 0 or 1. A value of 1 disables hardware acceleration. A value of 0 enables hardware acceleration