What's up with high CPU on RE:extinction?

[andy o]

I've read some posts about it already, but I wanted to make a thread of this specific problem. It seems that Resident Evil: Extinction uses an inordinate amount of CPU power. Some blu-rays in general seem to, but this one is the first to max my CPU. Using PowerDVD 3516, it peaks at times, (Pentium Dual-Core OC'd to 2.25 GHz). With AnyDVD, it is better, I guess because of AACS removal, but still going well into the 70's (yet another reason to use AnyDVD unrelated to copy protection per se).

So anyone has an idea why this is so? I don't think it's the AVC H.264 thing, since my nVidia 8600GTS should handle that easily, and no other discs (especially HD-DVDs) run the CPU this high. I am certain something else is running, probably BD-J, but is it supposed to waste that much resources? I don't think there's BD+ on this disc. I have not followed too closely the profile 1.1 and 1.2 or whatever stupid nonsense the blu-ray people is shoving down our throats now, so I don't know how it's gonna affect CPU usage. Boy did we get screwed by the blue people.

Even with stuff that it's not required for the format, they bloat the discs. Advertisements, countless nag screens about any stupid little "warning" they can come up with, and not even allowing us to bypass them with one button push. No, we have to press the chapter skip button several times. And what the "#$&% is with the loading screens filling up little silhouettes, or rats dancing? HD-DVD certainly doesn't do that, I don't know what is it that the blu-rays need so much time to load.

Oh well, yet another rant against the Blu, I know, but hardly ever anyone mentions the bloatware that it is. I think it's the most significantly annoying thing about it I can think of. Maybe more than BD+ (OK, I really didn't mean that). So anyone knows why RE:E takes so much CPU? And why particularly at chapter changes. Another weird thing is that when I pause the movie, the CPU is still going strong at 50%, and doesn't stop.

[andy o]

OK, I just popped the Life of Brian blu-ray, and it pretty much confirms that these guys will put anything in the disc to justify the storage space "advantage". It has both an uncompressed PCM and a lossless TrueHD! I mean, come on! I know "audiophiles" rant about lossless and high def audio, but would anyone notice the difference between lossless and uncompressed?

[Adbear]

have you tried playing it in Powerdvd with 'Information' showing, it'll give you some idea of the bitrate being used at those points. Also the majority of HD DVD's use VC-1 which doesn't seem to use anywhere near as much CPU usage and the Bitrate in HD DVD can't go as high as it can on Blu-ray

[andy o]

Yeah, the bitrate is nowhere near high. It's like 26-30 mbps almost all the time. And the HD-DVDs I've tried are indeed H.264. Also, my card handles the h.264, but not VC-1, so actually with my setup VC-1 titles have higher CPU consumption with HD-DVDs and supposedly with blu-ray too. I can just imagine my CPU usage if RE:E was VC-1. Either something other than the video itself is using up the great majority of the CPU, or hardware acceleration is broken with this title in PowerDVD. I have heard that build 3730 doesn't fix it either, by the way. Do you not have any problems with this title?

[frg]

Could you please make a little test on Resident Evil: Extinction:

Switch to the spanish track, or the commentary (the only audio tracks NOT in DTHD), and check if you CPU usage remains abnormally high.

[tobyking]

Same Problem here.
The CPU Usage is higher when playing Resident Evil Extinction than other discs.
I have a Logitech G15 keyboard with a LCD to display CPU Usage. Never drops below 45%.

[andy o]

Originally Posted by frg

Could you please make a little test on Resident Evil: Extinction:

Switch to the spanish track, or the commentary (the only audio tracks NOT in DTHD), and check if you CPU usage remains abnormally high.

I already returned the disc, but even if what you're suggesting worked (maybe someone else can test, please?) there is no reason why the TrueHD decrypting should take so much CPU load. I also tried Life of Brian, which also has a TrueHD track, alongside a PCM one, and the CPU was not high at all. Actually, it was high (like on the 30's), considering that with my card, with H.264 the CPU usage should be virtually zero, but all these "feature" bloats and copy protection encryptions suck more CPU juice than the video and audio themselves.

By the way, Life of Brian is not the only other TrueHD movie I've tried, I've tried many others, including HD-DVDs, which consume much less CPU in general and are more consistent (not much variance between discs). I don't know what the hell the Blu people are trying to do here.

[frg]

Originally Posted by andy o

I already returned the disc, but even if what you're suggesting worked (maybe someone else can test, please?) there is no reason why the TrueHD decrypting should take so much CPU load.

It should not, but I have noticed on my PC that, when reading BD, the use of a DTHD tracks uses abnormally high CPU resources.

The best example I can provide, is Fifth Element (Remastered), as it proposes both PCM and DTHD tracks:
- When reading the PCM track, my CPU is at about 40%.
- When I switch to the DTHD track, CPU usage jumps at 90%!

Is it only my PC, or has anyone else noticed a similar pattern?

In my experience, PCM, DD, DD+, and DTS tracks of any kind, use negligible CPU resources.

And the crazy thing is that, with HD DVD, DTHD just goes totally unnoticed as well!!!

FYI my PC uses the following:
- CPU: Pentium IV 3.2 (Northwood)
- Graphic card: ATI 2600Pro AGP
- Soundcard : M-Audio 1010LT, used in 5.1 analog OUT

I also tried Life of Brian, which also has a TrueHD track, alongside a PCM one, and the CPU was not high at all. Actually, it was high (like on the 30's), considering that with my card, with H.264 the CPU usage should be virtually zero, but all these "feature" bloats and copy protection encryptions suck more CPU juice than the video and audio themselves.

Quite right!
If I read the "raw" file from a BD, CPU usage drops to a mere 5%.

But then, there is no choice of the audio track (in most cases, the default track is an ordinary DD), nor any subtitle.

By the way, Life of Brian is not the only other TrueHD movie I've tried, I've tried many others, including HD-DVDs, which consume much less CPU in general and are more consistent (not much variance between discs). I don't know what the hell the Blu people are trying to do here.

BD seems to have been conceived, without any consideration about the power that would be needed to make it work properly !

[Adbear]

Originally Posted by frg

Could you please make a little test on Resident Evil: Extinction:

Switch to the spanish track, or the commentary (the only audio tracks NOT in DTHD), and check if you CPU usage remains abnormally high.

I've tried this with mine and have found that when I switch off the HD audio and just use the Spanish it works perfectly, when I go back to the English HD track it peaks and starts to skip

[frg]

That answers my question: my PC is OK.

It is effectively either a bug in PowerDVD, or an effect of the paranoïa of the BD forum, that makes Dolby True HD use insane quantities of CPU resources, to be decoded!

And when you think that "decoding" for DTHD simply means "unzipping PCM", there is enough to drive you crazy, knowing that it works fine with HD DVD...