New ATI 9550 and DVI monitor = Bad PQ

[robk]

I need some help! For over 2 1/2 years I have used Sage in my office with a 2.4G Celeron, 1 Gig RAM PC266, VIA chipset, Radeon 7000, Hauppauge 250 fed via S-Video from a DirecTV D10-100 and a 15", then a 17" square LCD monitor. The picture quality has been superb, Client works, Placeshifter works, all was well. Then I had this brilliant idea to upgrade to a Diamond Stealth ATI 9550 and connect it by DVI to a new 20" widescreen LCD. Well, the picture (video) stinks! Also I'm getting some streaking lines when I use Nvidia "Smart",
"Best Available" for interlacing. The recording quality is set to DVD standard 3.2G/hr.
The windows desktop and applications are crisp and clear, bright, couldn't ask for a better display. But when I try to watch Live TV through Sage, it's a blurry mess, looks like a bad JPEG with artifacting, and the colors are oversaturated and bleeding. I'm using Nvidia decoder 1.02.233, Overlay (VMR9 is a disaster - can't turn off CC, crashes). I installed the drivers that came with the Diamond ATI 9550 - is that a mistake? I have always disliked Diamond Stealth stuff, but I got a deal. Should I try a genuine ATI Catalyst driver, or must I stick with a branded driver?

I have tried every conceivable combination of settings - the best so far seems to be "let application decide" on a lot of the ATI Catalyst options, that way I can control things like brightness and gamma through the nvidia control panel (but not ALL the controls are active with the DVI connection). One strange thing - Pre-recorded Sage movies play pretty decent in Windows Media Player 11, as do MPEG4 files but appear a little washed-out. It
seems Sage doesn't like the new card / monitor setup. Any ideas? I have checked all the obvious stuff, like DX9 is up to date, monitor settings, aspect ratio settings in Sage tweaked, etc. Am I missing something? I'm almost ready to go back to my old Radeon 7000 and 17" VGA monitor! Maybe someone with a similar setup could throw me a few hints!

Thanks much,
Rob

[robk]

-bump-

[scoful]

Are you still having these problems? I just replaced my Nvidia 7300 with a 7600 and initially experienced poor quality on SD video - the Deinterlacing looked terrible. HD had messed up colors with vertical bands through it.

Apparently the Purevideo settings change between SD and HD content. I changed the SD deinterlacing which significantly improved it's quality.

The HD problem seemed to not be changed by any of the settings - it would occasionally go away but came right back. I was about to give up and look for a different decoder and decided to go to the 'Color' tab. I set it to 'Default' and everything seems to be working right now....