My goal is the same as many others, to have a Windows 7 VM for media center purposes, and like some I plan to only access the media over xbox360 extenders. With much appreciated help from so many contributors in this thread, I was able to passthrough an ATI HD 5450. The only problem I currently have, is recorded and live tv is pixilated/choppy. I was hoping someone could let me know if my video card could be the issue, even though I am accessing over an extender. If not the video, does anyone have any suggestions for better quality video? I have tried enabling flow control and forcing the NIC to 100Mb full duplex, but that didn't seem to help. I recently switched the vNIC from an E1000 to a VMXNET3 device, that did seem to help a little, but is still choppy. I also found a link about creating a registry entry for FastSendDatagramThreshold (http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2012/10/turbo-charge-view-video-performance.html), which I added and tried a few suggested values as well but didn't see any change. Are there any other suggestions out there, is anyone getting good HD quality video on a Win7 VM with an HD5450 GPU? I haven't messed with the codecs too much yet, I tried with win7 default codecs and also with Shark's latest release. Thanks in advance if anyone has any suggestions, if I left out any key details, please let me know.
CPU = 2xE5670@2.93Ghz
RAM = 48Gb DDR3
Datastore = R5 3+1 15krpm SAS drives
GPU = Diamond ATI HD 5450
Tuner = Hauppauge WinTV DCR-2650