HD Capture card advise sought

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by roxy99

I am pretty sure the Ti4200 is accelerated, at least in direct 3d (thats for sure).

Yeah, DirectX (7 I think), but nothing as far as DXVA or VMR9.

Also my PC is 512ram only, which doesn't help.

That's not a problem, I've run Sage on 512MB without any problems.

But if you can get a 6 or 7 series, that should make a noticeable difference.

[blade]

Originally Posted by roxy99

I am pretty sure the Ti4200 is accelerated, at least in direct 3d (thats for sure).

I don't know much about the Ti4200, but I was running VMR9 with a Geforce3 Ti200 at 1280x1024 and it was pushing the card pretty hard. I'm not really sure how all the DX7, 8, & 9 ties in or if my card was even able to take full advantage of VMR9 (I doubt it could). I did have transparent menus and FSE worked and I was getting hardware accelleration in Sage. It was running on an underclocked athlon xp at 1100 mhz.

The bottleneck for me was without a doubt the video card when running in VMR9. Overclocking seemed to help as well. When I replaced it with a 6200 it was of course a huge improvement.

[roxy99]

Originally Posted by blade

I don't know much about the Ti4200, but I was running VMR9 with a Geforce3 Ti200 at 1280x1024 and it was pushing the card pretty hard. I'm not really sure how all the DX7, 8, & 9 ties in or if my card was even able to take full advantage of VMR9 (I doubt it could). I did have transparent menus and FSE worked and I was getting hardware accelleration in Sage. It was running on an underclocked athlon xp at 1100 mhz.

The bottleneck for me was without a doubt the video card when running in VMR9. Overclocking seemed to help as well. When I replaced it with a 6200 it was of course a huge improvement.

I must be getting hardware acceleration at 1920x1080i otherwise it would be complete slideshow. As it is, there are only occassional hiccups where the GPU may be struggling at 1920x1080. I may try overclocking it first.

DX9 is not fully hardware supported (since its a DX 8 Card) but I never thought that should interfere with VMR9 as long as I have DX 9 drivers. However, many DX 9 features are disabled and may pose a penalty. So I infer that being a DX 8 card I should use overlay until I get a GF 6200 at which point its another realm of performance.

Oh well, I suppose FX 6200 is very cheap now, so thats no big deal.
Should I re-install the detonator drivers or just change the video card?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by roxy99

I must be getting hardware acceleration at 1920x1080i otherwise it would be complete slideshow.

You're confusing things I think. The Ti4200 has no DXVA, DirectX Video Accelleration, I 99.9999% sure because the Geforce 4MX did, but the Ti did not.

This means that your CPU is doing all the decoding, deinterlacing, etc.

As it is, there are only occassional hiccups where the GPU may be struggling at 1920x1080. I may try overclocking it first.

DX9 is not fully hardware supported (since its a DX 8 Card) but I never thought that should interfere with VMR9 as long as I have DX 9 drivers.

What happens if you try and play a DX9 game on that? It works, but it's not pretty. Lots and lots of stuff is disabled and it runs a lot slower than it would on a true DX9 card.

Same thing here. I don't know how nVidia handles VMR9 on non DX9 cards (since VMR9 uses Direct 3D for a renderer), if I had to guess, it simulates VMR9 with VMR7.

However, many DX 9 features are disabled and may pose a penalty.

Well, regardless, your card is a bottleneck:

No (or not full) support for VMR9.
No DXVA - no hardware accelleration for MPEG decoding.
No hardware deinterlacing.

So I infer that being a DX 8 card I should use overlay until I get a GF 6200 at which point its another realm of performance.

Oh well, I suppose FX 6200 is very cheap now, so thats no big deal.

Honestly, if you can't get a 6600, I probably wouldn't bother (well, I guess even a 6200 would be an improvement). The 6200 is known to be on the weak side for 1080i/p VMR9. 6600GT is really the best AGP card, as far as video goes.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

That or maybe a 7600GS.

Should I re-install the detonator drivers or just change the video card?

I'd reinstall the drivers when put the card in.

[roxy99]

Definately worth upgrading either way. But the Ti4200 is a GF 4 and ranks higher than a GF 4 MX. Its the equiavlent to a GF 5600, without the DX 9. Odd that they chose to support dxva in the mx (a budget video card at the time) but not in the Ti4200 (A mid-high end card at the time).


EDIT: Just got home and started watching live tv. 720p seems to look the same as 1080i, without the frame stutter. Funny thing is, even though ti4200 does not do DVXA, which means my cpu is doing the work, my cpu util % is only 27% with full screen VMR9 playback.
As I said, no stuttering and reasonably decent playback. Obviously, interlaced mpeg2 decoding is out of the question for my video card.

I remember u helped me back in april with the same issue. So maybe I can just contine with the ti4200 using 720p. What do you think?

[jmiddleton]

There is an intermediate HD resolution 540p (960x540x60Hz) that may look better if your 4200 supports it. Text will never be pretty on a CRT projection TV, any more than it was on an old SD tube set. The TV's were never intended to display text. If you're using the system for more than a PVR you'll want your monitor decoupled from the TV (not cloned - you want to set the resolution independently). Put Sage on the extended display in full screen mode. It should look pretty good.

[blade]

Originally Posted by jmiddleton

Text will never be pretty on a CRT projection TV, any more than it was on an old SD tube set.

Actually it can look much better than the old SD sets. When I send a 720p signal to my 1080i rear projection crt there is no noticable flicker and it's very readable. Good enough that I can even use it for light web browsing. Sending a 1080i signal isn't nearly as good, but I have gotten the windows desktop so there is no noticable flicker and the icons are large and easy to read. Web browsing isn't really an option due to the flicker, but the text is easy to read when zooming with the browser.

I agree if you're going to use it for much else a monitor would be a good idea, but it doesn't have to be totally unusable.