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I noticed that when I use ATI Tray Tools to rotate my screen 90 degrees (left or right), the screen processing gets really slow; Firefox or any program lags (uses 100% of one CPU-core when menu items are shown), and I see nasty refresh rate tearing when I scroll pages down in firefox (it looks like the screen is split in multiple vertical pieces and each of them are stepped down ~30 pixels more than the previous pieces at left).

If I watch a video (with VLC) and then right click for settings, the UI starts to lag a lot; it's hard to move to different menu item because of it, and the CPU usage gets to 100% (for one core), and when I exit the menu, I notice the video decompression has become "corrupted", so I need to wait a while until it gets back to normal.

On Windows Media Player the video decompression is broken at all the time, so it's impossible to watch any movies with it (not that I would). On the other hand, the Windows Media Player doesn't get laggy when I go to right click menus. Perhaps Firefox and VLC uses the same menu rendering library, which somehow is bugging with this 90 degree rotation?

Is it possible to fix this lag / excess CPU usage, without replacing my screen or GPU ?

Screen: Samsung SyncMaster 226BW

GPU: ASUS EAH3450 (newest drivers)

OS: Windows XP SP3 (havent updated in a year, and probably wont update for the fear of getting my computer locked down due to "illegal" copy of windows (which I had actually bought (unfortunately))).

Changing my OS isn't a solution to me. I already tried Windows 7 before, but it reduced my GPU efficiency around 20%. I already have a very bad GPU, which why I need all the speed I can get, thus I'm using Windows XP.

Rookie
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1 Answers1

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I believe this is due to the draw method, the origins of all this "stream of data", and drawing a screen, were to draw it line by line in front of the viewer very fast. (crt)
The data is still being transfered between things in much the same linear data stream as it was before. 

_______________________________________line1

_______________________________________line2 (etc)

It is just being displayed now in one single refresh of the screen. When you rotate the thing, everything changes:

    _ <-- that goes | there   
and _     this goes |  here  
and _       on & on |

Till all the data is streamed lineraly to the display device, completly rearranged. It is much different work, vrses the way the stuff was originally designed.

This is a pretty lame explaination, but it might explain it quick enough.

If both pieces of hardware were designed to work in the different aspect of the "rotated" display (not actually rotated), and the data stream didnt have to be all re-arraged, then there is no reason why a "portrait" display would be any slower. It just isnt done that way. It is very possible that a monitor exists that just has a different aspect, where it is taller vrses wide.

If this process of rotating is done a lot better optomised, works with the hardware better, it should be able to be done without destroying everything.

Another thing that can happen is sub-pixel rendering (clear type) doesnt work right, because of how the 3 cells of color are arranged horizontal, and now are rotated. So done proper that all has to be changed too. From what I understand so far it isnt.

Speaking of Renders, for the things that act different, and your getting a failed display of a video player, change the render type. The "overlay" render type only cuts out a hole in the software, then this hole is filled by the hardware. Most all the video players including microsofts have a setting somewhere to change the render type.

Synetech
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Psycogeek
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