Intersting article for folks looking to buy a video card for use with Sage

[mikesm]

Tom's has a fascinating article here: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/..._vs_purevideo/ on avvivo vs. purevideo.

Note the terrible performance of the nvidia cards under XP vs Vista. This is almost certainly the VMR9 vs. EVR issue. It also may help explain why Sage has issues under Vista with Nvidia cards because it doesn't support EVR.

I wish they would do a study of MPEG2 support, and have flagged that in the article discussion thread.

Thanks,
Mike

[Djc208]

Anandtech has some stuff on HD playback quality with the newer DX-10 graphics cards.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3047

[GTwannabe]

Originally Posted by mikesm

Tom's has a fascinating article here: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/..._vs_purevideo/ on avvivo vs. purevideo.

Note the terrible performance of the nvidia cards under XP vs Vista. This is almost certainly the VMR9 vs. EVR issue. It also may help explain why Sage has issues under Vista with Nvidia cards because it doesn't support EVR.

I wish they would do a study of MPEG2 support, and have flagged that in the article discussion thread.

Thanks,
Mike

nVidia's crappy XP video performance has nothing to do with VMR9 vs. EVR. The problem is that nVidia stopped adding features (HD decode and post-processing) to their XP drivers so they could focus on Vista. They figure anyone still running XP is either a business user or a gamer, neither of which are much concerned with full HD support.

You can get flawless HD video playback in Sage on Vista with the following settings:

- 7600GT-class or better GF7/GF8
- PureVideo decoder
- Aero desktop enabled
- Sage 3D mode enabled
- Sage VMR9 rendering enabled
- Sage FSE disabled