Accelerated video cards, general

[PeteInSF]

I am making a few dedicated video client PCs and I having difficulty selecting video cards... In reading (this forum) I see the 5200 seem to be the preferred card (for s-video anyway).

The PC have built in Nvidia TNT chips but by looking at the CPU usage I don't think they have hardware that helps Mpeg play back.

My question is what GPU chips assist sage on play back, will other (older) GeForce or ATI models work as well for playback (on a XVGA monitor). I would just get a 5200 but a PCI one is $90+

Also is there a noticeable quality difference between MPEG accelerated cards during playback?

[mlbdude]

I purchased and tried several cards. The 5200 and the 9000 ATI looked the best. Did not try anything besides nVidia and ATI. I liked the 9000 over the 5200 for a few reasons:

Looked better to me. Not night and day but better.

With hardware assist turned on watching TV only uses 18% CPU on a P3 1000.

Cost me only $60.

Good luck.

[Crazedz]

Ah well hardware assisted playback has existed on the geforce cards since at least the geforce 2. However Nvidia had problems getting it to work right up through the Geforce 3. But that changed when they came out with the Geforce 4. With the release of thoughs cards they had gotten the problems worked out and they work very well.

This was what i remember from a article i read on the Geforce 4 card a while back but for the life of me i can't recall what the problem was that they had or how they finally fixed it. But i do know they had crappy Svideo out to tv on the older ones and up till Version 4 ATI had the better Svideo out. But now well i'm not sure but the Geforce cards Video out looks good to me and the Quality looks very good plus as mlbdude said the Cpu usage goes down quite a bit. Mine is around 0 to 4 % in sleep mode while recording and 14 to 24% while awake both tuners recording and watching a show on a 1.4 gig Athlon (Thunderbird core) so it does very well.

As for ATI i can't really say as i never looked into their cards at the time i was more into gaming so i was useing my tv card solely for my main pc as well as playing games on it. For gaming at the time Geforce was the better card but that's gone back and forth so many times iv'e kinda lost track of who's got the best gaming card and who's now the best at video.

But as i said the Geforce 4 works well enough for me so if you can get a Geforce 4 pci for a decient price that should be good. Otherwise you could try a Geforce 2 or 3 but remember they had problems and the video out may not be what your hoping for.

That's about all i have on the Geforce line of cards so see what you can find i would try both the ATI and the Nvidia Geforce line and decide for yourself. Because some say the ATI cards look better but i have also heard from others who say the Geforce cards now look better so it's kinda something where you need to see what looks best to you.