Flash video performance on '06 mac pro & ATI 4870

[paulpet]

Hi all,

Today I just bought and installed an (Apple) ATI 4870 for my '06 Mac Pro. It's all gone pretty smoothly, however I have noticed that flash video playback from sites such as Youtube and Vimeo are jerky. Anyone else noticed this?

Have I missed something about installing a 4870 into an older MP? I thought it was basically plug and play - even though it's not officially supported by Apple.

Quicktime movies are nice and smooth.

This is under Snow Leopard, so I'm not sure if the problem exists under Leopard but I could probably move my last bootable backup drive into an enclosure with firewire and check things out.

Any thoughts or help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
-Paul

 

[TheStrudel]

I feel like flash is probably the culprit here, something to do with Snow Leopard or alternatively the drivers. Flash would be tolerable if its performance on non-windows OSes was respectable, but it isn't. Especially when it comes to video. Anybody else seen something similar?

 

[paulpet]

Hi. I don't think it's flash problem as performance with the same videos on my old graphics card (under Snow Leopard) was just fine.

Thanks,
-Paul

 

[TheStrudel]

I'm running a flashed 4870 on an '08 Mac Pro in leopard, and haven't had any issues with flash, so I'm theorizing that it's not the card here, but a perfect storm of issues with Snow Leopard, Flash, and possibly drivers all causing the problems you see.

 

[paulpet]

Ok, I'm sorry - this may have been a false alarm. As far as I can tell playback is just fine under Safari, but jerky with Firefox. I swear it seemed to be working fine under FF with my old graphics card earlier today.

I'll investigate further.

Thanks for your input Strudel.


-Paul

 

[JPamplin]

Honestly, I think it's the 10.6 drivers for ATI - my 3870 isn't up to snuff as well. I think this will be solved with a future point release.

Let's hope!

JP

 

[daveporter]

It does appear to be Flash/Snow Leopard related. I have noticed video playback stuttering on my Mac Pro 1.1 with the stock GeForce 7300 GT video card that was never there before. If you watch Activity Monitor when you play back a Flash video in 10.6 you will note that the CPU demands have increased by quite a lot over what they were with 10.5. Others have reported this problem in many other forums as well. If you force Safari to operate in 32 bit mode (right click on Safari, select info and then check the "open in 32 bit" checkbox) it reduces the problem but does not totally eliminate it. In my case, I have found that Firefox (which only operates in 32 bit mode) does not suffer from this problem as much as Safari does when it is operated in 64 bit mode. [Just a note: In 10.6 when you monitor Safari CPU demands you need to add what you see for the Safari process as well as the Flash process since they are reported separately. In 10.5 you need only monitor the Safari process since here it includes the plugin (Flash in this case) CPU demands as well.]

Looks like Apple and Adobe will need to work this out (assuming that Apple wants to work it out) for Flash to work properly as a plugin for Safari with 10.6.