SMPlayer dropping frames on video that MPC-HC plays fine

[Rayman1]

I'm playing an x264 video on an Asus laptop that has an AMD radeon HD8180 graphics chip. MPC-HC plays it fine but SMPlayer is very choppy. I have multimedia engine set to mpv and video set to GPU (because this is what it's set to on my other Win 7 computer that does play it fine) but I've tried various other combinations and nothing is improving it.

The operating system is windows 10 with 4GB RAM.

Any help appreciated.

[rvm]

Try enabling hardware decoding or increasing the threads for decoding in preferences -> performance.

[Rayman1]

Thanks rvm.

The hardware decoding was set to none and I put it to auto and that fixed it. I had been so busy trying to adjust the video settings that I completely ignored the Performance tab. D'oh!

For my chipset is there a particular option for hardware decoding that is better than leaving it at auto? And wouldn't it be better for a new install to default to auto rather than no hardware decoding?

[rvm]

Hardware decoding doesn't work on all computers.