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DVD cards/gfx cards

  • 07-11-2001 6:50pm
    #1
    Gavin
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,676 ✭✭✭


    How do,

    I have a dual PIII450 at the mo with a voodoo3 3000, 640 mb ram. I want to get a dvd drive for it.. will it run ok.. what sort of quality will it be ?

    I also got a new monitor recently, and want to run it and my old one together. So I have seen some cards around, namely the matrox, ati radeon ve, and an asus defore2 mx. all dual head. And, they have support for dvd playback as well....

    So it's either get one of those.. or find a second pci gfx card for cheap and possibly upgrade my agp card to one with a bit better dvd playback.. Anyone have any experience with these cards.. or any opinions would be appreciated..

    Cheers,
    Gav


Comments

  • #2
    Gerry
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,484 ✭✭✭Gerry


    I had a pIII 450 with a voodoo banshee and it played dvd's well enough with cinemaster or powerdvd. It is marginal though as in I wasn't convinced it was completely smooth (perhaps it was just my imagination), but if you get any of those graphics cards you will be fully sorted. They all support motion compensation, which takes a good bit of the load from the cpu. In my experience, the ati or matrox would be the best bet, I don't think the geforce is as good at dvd as it claims to be.

    As for players, cinemaster will offer you better performance than powerdvd, but this gap has narrowed, and powerdvd offers more features and better quality. (also much easier to setup) You can tweak powerdvd or cinemaster with dvdgenie if performance isn't adequate.


  • #3
    Red Moose
    Closed Accounts Posts: 222 ✭✭Red Moose


    I had no trouble at all playing DVDs on my P3-500 with a 32MB TNT2 card. I would say just about any card these days is fine, and pick one for games, as they all are pretty much fine for DVD playing. I had no problems whatsoever, perfectly smooth at 25fps or whatever PAL runs at (inclduing TV output).

    You could invest money in a fancy but-crap-3D Matrox or ATI card, but like I said, a TNT2 (about on par with a Voodoo 3000 I think, may be wrong though) and P3-500 - close enough to a P3-450 system (SMP prob won't make a difference).

    One thing I did notice was that I had to drop the desktop resolution to 1024x768x16bit, as when I tried to play DVDs using a basic player it gave me "out of video memory" messages when my desktop was at 1280x1024 or more.

    Also, I had no problems decoding the VOB files and making DivX out of them, came out with top quality.

    It prob comes down to video ram than anything to do with "DVD video acceleration" because I have never been able to find out what those sort of adverts are really talking about. DVD is MPEG2 video with encryption (almost).


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