I have an HP pavilion laptop with an S3 Savage graphics card running under the xorg savage driver. It struggles to play video, for example when playing a 480x320 Theora video in a window, the CPU utilization is almost 100%, and can't keep up above that size.
I found this old thread on the topic, and it seems like people on there ARE able to get good video playing performance with the card, however I've already done everything that thread suggests:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=255734
lspci on my system says:
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. VT8636A [ProSavage KN133] AGP4X VGA Controller (TwisterK) (rev 01)
And I'm using the xorg savage driver. It clearly supports Xv, as xine-check reports:
[ good ] found xvinfo: X-Video Extension version 2.2
[ good ] your Xv extension supports YV12 overlays (improves MPEG performance)
[ good ] your Xv extension supports YUY2 overlays
[ good ] Xv ports: YUY2 YV12 I420 RV15 RV16 Y211
I've tried xine, gstreamer, and mplayer, and all are slow. When I resize a window to make it larger, CPU utilization goes up, which suggests that the scaling is being done in software rather than hardware, which seems like it's wrong.
I've tested the CPU utilization of the video *decoding* by turning video output off, and video *decoding* only uses about 30% of the CPU power. So it should be able to play video at a decent speed.
Has anyone gotten good performance with this card and graphics driver, and do you have any advice for me? Thanks a lot!!!
