[mythtv-users] 6200 warning: (Was: Re: AGP card recommendation to push hi-def)

[Jesse Guardiani]

On Thursday 06 April 2006 11:06 pm, Brian Wood wrote:
> 
> On Apr 6, 2006, at 8:51 PM, Allan Wilson wrote:
> 
> > I am looking for the best AGP video card that has passive cooling  
> > that will do Hi-Def. Will the passive cards be enough to show  
> > movies w/o loosing to many frames. Thanks for the input.
> >
> 
> I'm not sure if any of the 5xxx nVidia cards have passive cooling  
> (none of mine do), but the 6200 should do a nice job and does.


Warning about the 6200 (I own 5200 and 6200 AGP cards):
The 6200 has problems with XvMC. You have to turn off AGP bus support
in the xorg.conf to get it working. Symptoms are a half second of audio,
then just black screen. Happens with nvidia 7676 driver and 8178.

The XvMC page on the wiki recommends turning on NvAGP = 1 in your xorg.conf
to fix it, and that works, but what you're really doing is telling the card
to use NvAGP or no AGP at all. And since the agpgart module loads by default,
you're really using NvAGP = 0, which effectively disables AGP. I've successfully
loaded NvAGP without agpgart on my system, and it does the same thing, so it
would appear that this card just has issues with AGP + XvMC. I'm not sure what
effect disabling AGP has on the system in general, but I'd guess you're losing
some bandwidth by doing that. My 6200 still plays back 1080i, so maybe I'm
making a big deal out of nothing.

Also, you'll notice that the OSD creates some odd transparency effects with
the 6200. When you pause, for example, you'll see a translucent bar across
the entire top of the screen to the left of the OSD. My 5200 doesn't do that.

The one redeeming quality of the 6200 vs 5200 is that it's 3D engine is
much faster. But if you can get a 5200 and you only need to do XvMC, then
you might want to just stick with a 5200. You can use the Chromakey OSD
with a 5200 for in-color OSD support with XvMC too. 6200 doesn't support
the features necessary for the in-color OSD.

My 2 cents. Hope that helps.


-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at wingnet.net