[mythtv-users] MX440/Radeon wars (Was: Hardware ideas)
Jarod Wilson
jcw at wilsonet.com
Fri Jun 25 04:22:41 EDT 2004
On Jun 25, 2004, at 00:30, Clyde Stubbs wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 02:49:48PM -0700, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> Hold on just a sec... One person's FUD-spreading about nVidia cards
>> shouldn't
>
> With all due respect, I wasn't spreading FUD, just offering advice
> based on
> my own experience. If I come across as somewhat enthusiastic in my
> endorsement
> of the Radeon cards for TV-out, it's simply because I originally
> bought nVidia
> based on what I read on this mailing list and other places, then spent
> several
> months battling with broken drivers, and generally being disappointed
> with
> the quality, all of which was fixed with the outlay of a very small
> amount of
> cash and a little work.
I'm sure in your case, the Radeon is better. But you make it sound like
you're authoritative, and the GF4 is a terrible choice, despite the
myriad of people using them on this list, who get excellent results.
Why you had such problems, I don't know. I've used several, and had
zero problems getting any of them to work perfectly within minutes of
installing the nvidia driver.
>> quality video on a TV hooked to it via SVideo. The difference in
>> quality
>> between a PVR-350 and my GF4 cards is fairly miniscule.
>
> I haven't seen the output of a PVR-350 so I can't comment, all I can
> tell you
> is that the S-Video output of a Radeon 9200SE is vastly better than
> the nVidia
> MX440 (I've tried both the nForce2 integrated video and an AGP card).
In your case, that may be so. However, further down, I think we'll see
you may not have been taking the right approach with your GF4s... And
this isn't an MX440/Radeon war, this is me objecting to your blanket
statement that GeForce 4 MX-440 cards suck.
> By vastly better, I'm referring specifically to the video bandwidth,
> which
> shows up as a much cleaner, crisper image. I should mention that I'm
> using
> DVB-T tuner cards so the original image quality is very good.
The DVB-T card could be a differentiating factor, I dunno.
> I have no doubt that using a good quality RGB->S-Video converter would
> do as well or better, but they cost more than the video cards.
Dunno, I don't use one. Some people like 'em, some people have been
rather disappointed with 'em.
>> folks. And for the second time, the TV encoder on a GeForce card DOES
>> interlace the signal for output to a TV, just like the Radeon does.
>> The
>
> Sure, the TV-encoder will interlace the output - but the interlaced
> output
> support in the nVidia closed source drivers has been broken for a
> long, long
> time. The 4363 driver you recommend does not support interlaced output.
It does on the TV encoder. I think you're not fully understanding how
this works...
> I think the last nVidia driver that had working interlace was 3123.
> If you attempt to choose an interlaced mode with the later drivers you
> get the "bad mode clock/interlace/doublescan" error.
You select a progressive-scan resolution, like 640x480, 800x600 or
1024x768, then the TV encoder scales and interlaces the signal to match
the specs you give in XF86Config (such as NTSC & SVideo). You don't
specify an interlaced mode to X.
> It does work under Windoze, so it's not a chip problem, just a driver
> problem.
> And the open-source nv drivers don't have good support for TV-out, and
> have dismal performance.
Supposedly, the next nvidia driver release will have interlaced mode
support. We shall see. But again, this is really only an issue if
you're outputting via VGA or DVI to a high-definition set at something
like 1920x1080i...
>> better with timings than the GF4s. I'm curious if you have
>> deinterlacing
>> turned on in your setup...
>
> Yes, I do. I'm not trying to deal with interlaced video *sources*,
> I simply need interlacing because my TV does not handle horizontal
> scan rates at the 31.5kHz or so needed for progressive scan.
Which the TV-out encoder does, even with the 4363 nvidia driver.
> The impression I get is that this might not be a particularly common
> problem - certainly all those people happily using
> nVidia closed source drivers and TV-out must have TV's capable of
> progressive scan. One day I might too...
No, I believe they just use the TV-out encoder the way its intended...
--
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE
jcw at wilsonet.com
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