Video Card Advice (Newbie)

[bo989]

After having a slew of problems with PQ and getting some great advice in another thread, I realized that one of the things I really needed to do was upgrade my video card.

My current setup:
27" SDTV
AMD XP 2400+
512MB RAM
nVidia Ti4200
7200 RPM Hard Drives
*PVR 150 DUAL TUNERS*

I'm choosing between:
1. XFX FX5200
2. XFX FX5200 Ultra
3. MSI FX5700LE
4. MSI FX5700

I want to spend as little as I need to.

What I want it to do:
1. Run VMR9 *smoothly*
2. Do some *moderate/average* post-processing with ffdShow and the dScaler filter
3. Have the excellent PQ and color depth everyone credits the FX5200 with
4. Does not need to play games
5. Any opinion on the effective useful lifespan of each card and opinions on bang for the buck would also be appreciated.

My current thinking is that if the FX5200 can handle 1-3 then I could get that card and, since it's so cheap, just upgrade later when the need arises.

Thanks again guys for your invaluable input.

(P.S. Stanger, I already know you'd recommend the 5700LE and it's definitely a contender)

[bo989]

... bump.

[GbrNole]

the sdtv is an issue bigger than the video card.

for sdtv your best bet is an fx5700 or try one of the new volari's preferably the v5 or v8.

otherwise the pvr350 output is good but buggy and the xcard is excellent but lacks a lot of support.

[bo989]

Thanks for the reply.

ffdshow relies solely on CPU processing power, correct?
and VMR9 relies purely on GPU/video card processing power, right?

So, have you recommended the 5700 so that it will run VMR smoothly?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by bo989

ffdshow relies solely on CPU processing power, correct?
and VMR9 relies purely on GPU/video card processing power, right?

I'd say that's a pretty fair assessment.

[bo989]

Hi Stanger,

Thanks for following me into this new thread

I'm going to pass on the 350 for now because of all of the limited support and cost. I would have loved to get the Volari, but I can't find them anywhere with the component cable. So I would love to just get the FX5200 because its passively cooled and its cheap.

What disdvantage is there with the 5200 re: VMR? Will I notice a difference? Not exactly sure what VMR does anyway, but I understand it needs a certain amount of GPU processing power.

Oh, and stanger, I've been running my desktop in 720 x 480 for the last week or so on the suggestion of some people on this board. I only realized today that that's not a 4:3 ratio. Why is everyone using that resolution. My desktop totally bled off the edges at that resolution and frankly looked like crap. On a whim, I switched to 640x480 and everything is a lot clearer. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how 720x480 fits on the TV without being squeezed.

[mls]

This was something I was going to (sometime) discuss with stanger89 on the side, but since you brought it up here I'll wait and see what he posts here instead. Been to lazy to ever get around to PM him anyway.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by bo989

Hi Stanger,

Thanks for following me into this new thread

I'm going to pass on the 350 for now because of all of the limited support and cost. I would have loved to get the Volari, but I can't find them anywhere with the component cable. So I would love to just get the FX5200 because its passively cooled and its cheap.

Well the 5200 doesn't have component out either.

What disdvantage is there with the 5200 re: VMR? Will I notice a difference? Not exactly sure what VMR does anyway, but I understand it needs a certain amount of GPU processing power.

Basically there are 3 ways to get video onto the screen, via the Overlay mixer, via DirectDraw (VMR7 or "Default" in Sage), or Direct3D (VMR9). For a long time Overlay was the only, or at least the prefered way, Overlay uses special purpose hardware on the card to put video on your screen. VMR7 uses DirectDraw which I believe is more of a 2D renderer that's kind just there, it's not really great. VMR9 uses Direct3D, basically it draws video as a texture on a polygon. If you've followed the gaming scene any, you'll know that basically the card needs to be able to render your screen resolution at your refresh rate. In reality it's more complicated than that, but that should give you an idea why GPU power affects VMR9 so.

Oh, and stanger, I've been running my desktop in 720 x 480 for the last week or so on the suggestion of some people on this board. I only realized today that that's not a 4:3 ratio. Why is everyone using that resolution. My desktop totally bled off the edges at that resolution and frankly looked like crap. On a whim, I switched to 640x480 and everything is a lot clearer. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how 720x480 fits on the TV without being squeezed.

mls, feel free to chime in, since I'm not sure what questions you have. First I'll start with my (now broken) theory about this.

OK, so we've got our incoming SDTV signal, that's what 525 lines (total, only about 480 are "active") at about 15kHz scan rate, what that means to us, is that the PVR 250 (or whatever) digitizes that analog signal and then compresses it giving us a nice 720x480 video file (for comparison DVDs are 720x480). Now, what our SDTV is expecting is a video stream that's 525 lines 15kHz just like we captured. The goal is to get our 720x480 video file out of the card, converted to analog as closely to the orignal as possible. So what settings do we use? Well, the logical place to start is look at the beginning and end. We've got a 720x480 video file, and we want (essentially) 720x480 output. So the idea is to avoid messing with that anywhere in between.

From that I figured this sounded good. In Sage set the zoom settings to 100%, this should stop Sage from causing the picture to be changed. Then you set Windows to 720x480 so that the video doesn't need to be scaled to match the output resolution.

Sounds good right? I thought so too, but then I thought a little more and figured out that the answer is not so good. Let's recap where we are (since I'm getting wordy again). We have a nice 720x480 video file, that has been decoded, and drawn to the framebuffer, theoretically without being scaled. So we have a 720x480 image ready to go out of the card. Right here is were the theory begins to fall apart. If we were outputting VGA all would be good, but we aren't. What happens next is that your video card takes the framebuffer, and runs it through a TV encoder. Alright you say, what's the catch? The catch is that TVs are designed to run with (significant by PC standards) overscan. Meaning they are designed to have a good chunk of the picture off the screen (somewhere about 5% IIRC). However PCs are not designed with overscan in mind, so the video card actually shrinks the display by ~5% to compensate for overscan so you see the whole desktop. So now our nice 720x480 video is no longer, it's been scaled to something more like 640x400 or so. Of course it's complicated further by the fact that when you look at desktop type stuff (small text/lines) they flicker horribly at 480i so your video card usually throws a "flicker filter" in there which helps reduce the aparent flicker of text, but softens the image in the process making video poorer.

Note that this is why cards like the 350/Xcard are so popular, they just take the 720x480 video and convert it directly to analog, overscan and all, thus avoiding all of the pitfalls mentioned above.

So what to do? That's a good question. And there is unfortunately no one good answer. I've seen a couple recommendations that make sense though. One is to reduce the flicker filter, which should sharpen the image. Also make sure you use really good deinterlacing (I like the Geforce 5 and 6 series), this helps reduce scaling and interlacing of interlacing artifiacts. Other than that, see what others here recommend.

[mls]

The scaling to fit the desktop within the TV's overscan really shouldn't matter since it is reduce by the same amount all the way around (as long as it is a 4:3 TV and 4:3 resolutions such as 640x480). The overscan can be changed for the video card with various settings (overscan, video mode, theatre mode whatever depending on card/driver).

In either case though I don't know how you can get round circles without doing other adjustments if using 720x480, since that's not 4:3.

To add further confusion. It's my understanding that the 720x480 part is just an internal file mode used for storage and not directly related to what resolution (or aspect) the video should be played at.

All DVD's are 720x480 internally, but during the encoding a flag is set in the recording to tell the decoder which way to scale it back to the original. So, even if it is a 4:3 or a 16:9 aspect movie, it's still internally 720x480.

If you play back a 4:3 DVD with something like PowerDVD the window will normally shape/size to 620x480. For 16:9 it will change to something close to 720x480.

A while back I ran a DVD quality recording from SageTV thru some other video software (sorry don't remember which, messed with too many), and that program showed the file to have an intended display resolution of 640x480.

I know if using an HDTV, there are any number of other combinations of scan rates and such that could end up with getting 720x480 resized to come out 4:3, but somehow that seems like having to go thru a lot of extra fiddling to accomplish it.

Not having an HDTV, I haven't had a change to play with those ideas. However, for the S-video out to my cheap SD TV I've found 640x480 produced the best image (with proper driver settings). I noticed some of this also depended on which decoder. In my case, using PowerDVD (Cyberlink) decoder it all works out correctly.

I could be completely wrong about much of this (and probably am), so all I can say is that I've always considered 640x480 the logical choice for any SD TV video playback, and it works best that way with my system. As they say, your milage may vary

Straighten me out if I'm missing something.

[stanger89]

The problem (and where the confusion comes from) is two fold. First we're talking about analog signals which don't have "pixels". You could, for example output 1440x480i over S-Video and it would work just fine, the TV wouldn't be able to resolve the full 1440, but you could.

Then it's futher complicated by the fact that NTSC doesn't use square pixels, it uses rectangular pixels, I believe they are .9:1. So you take 720x480 which is 1.5:1 mulitply it by the pixel ratio and you get 1.35:1, or almost exactly 1.33:1 (4:3).

I should probably comment in here about how analog video is transmitted, since it will help I think. In the analog domain there are no pixels, just waves. Basically each frame consists of the active area, the part we watch, and porches (in powerstrip terminology). For example with SDTV, while we normaly consider it a 720x480i image, there are actually 525 lines of video transmitted in each frame, the difference is due to extra info needed for the display to sync to the signal.

First it's important to understand how the TV out on video cards works, because it's quite differnet than the normal outputs. On the normal outputs, let's use an example of 1024x768 on a monitor. In this case, windows is running at that resolution and the video card basically just takes that and adds the appropriate timing information to produce an output the display understands.

The TV out however works much different because it doesn't directly output what the video card is creating, it does it's own processing, for example you can set windows to 1024x768 and display that on the TV out, but it's not really transmitting that resolution, it's transmitting an approximation of that converted to 480i. And the same is true at 640x480, 720x480, 800x600. This is also why you can (partially) adjust the overscan and possition settings without changing the resolution. If you've played with powerstrip on an HDTV you'll know that it's not really possible to change vertical size without changing the actual resolution. What it is, is a scan converter (cheap scaler) built into the video card.

On the overscan subject I think a picture may help (I know it's 16:9 but bare with me)


Like I said above TVs are typically designed to run about 5% overscan, some run more, some less. So when you output something over the TV out, it doesn't use the full "frame" as it were, in fact, to compensate for overscan, you're probably not even using the normal 720x480 active area. To use the picture, if the whole thing were the 720x480 active area, when you output something over a video card's TV out, the 720x480 from Windows would be squished to fit inside the 5% box, and the rest would be filled with "blank pixels" you could say.

Does that make sense? I hope so.

Anyway, how does this all relate to video/Sage quality?

Basically you need to defeat everything that is supposed to enhance the desktop appearance. That means minimize any flicker filter. Probably maximize overscan, seems counterintuitive I know, but that should get you close to a CE type S-Video output. And I guess I'd have to continue to suggest trying the good old: Windows 720x480, Sage - AR=Fill, Zoom=100% to avoid any scaling by your video card and or software.

Now the disclaimer:
Since I don't use a TV out, I haven't tried any of this, so it's mostly a thought excercise for my part. So remember the most important bit of wisdom, just because someone else says it is or should be better doesn't make it so.

[kny3twalker]

I'm choosing between:
1. XFX FX5200
2. XFX FX5200 Ultra
3. MSI FX5700LE
4. MSI FX5700

if these were my chooses
then go 5700
your Ti4200 has a faster GPU than any of these cards
but you want directx9 support and hardware acceleration something that the 4200 cannot do
the 5700 would be the best choose

non LE of course

[bo989]

Well, I've narrowed things down even further. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with the 5700LE. I would just like someone to confirm for me that the only difference between the 5700LE and 5700 is a slower core/memory clock speed?

Most people seem to get along fine with the 5200, and the 5700LE has the same clock speed as the 5200 Ultra and is a bit faster on some tests, so I figure that it'll give me enough breathing room for VMR9.

One final condundrum though... I just read about the ATI9600 XT at HTPCnews. Most are saying the FX5xxx series is a better choice, but I'm intrigued by the ATI's component dongle. I have component inputs on my 27" SDTV and want to use them.

So, the final choice between video cards is:

ATI9600XT with component dongle
or FX5700LE

Which would you choose?

[stanger89]

Hmm, you didn't mention that. I that case the 9600XT + Dongle could be a better choice. It should allow you to run 480i over component and thus avoid many of the pitfalls mls and I have been discussing. One thing to consider, I've heard the AGP versions of the 6600 should be available soon. It should have component output, but would also be a MUCH better card than either the 5700 or 9600, possibly for not much more.

[GbrNole]

9600xt compared to a 5700le? that's quite a price difference your comparing there.

might as well go with a regular 5700 to even things out?

on a side not newegg is selling a 9600xt with heat pipe cooler for $135. it's refurb but i've never had an issue with newegg refurbs YMMV.

personally if you can wait a little longer i'd hold out for the 6600 agp version prices to drop a tad when the x700 agp cards are released.

[GbrNole]

stanger - the 6600 agp is very available now from multiple manufacturers you just have to look around the net for it. gameve.com has a few to choose from but the starting price is $230 which considering it's performance compared to any other agp based card is a damn good price.

all but xfx include the component dongle with the card thus far.

[bo989]

hi guys. thanks for the advice.

the 9600xt is more expensive here in Canada, but i thought i'd be willing to spend more if component was worth it.

I'm seriously considering splurging for the 6600, but I just have in the back of my mind that Sage is going to eventually support the xCard with OSD or some other "perfect" solution like that, and I can just upgrade at that time.

What do you think about component on an SDTV gbrNole?

[GbrNole]

the component out at 480i from a 6600 should look quite a bit better than any onboard tv endoder using s-vid that you can currently use.

unless you were seriously thinking about getting a high def set in the near future though i'm not sure i'd want to drop almost $250 on a video card for a non HD set?

if i was still using an SDTV personally i'd hold out a little while and hang on for a $60 volari v5 or $80 volari v8 complete with component cables.

[bo989]

Ya, it's too bad that the guy importing those to the states can't get a hold of the component cables.

With regards to component, one of my options was the 9600Xt (for about 140 USD on eBay) with the component adapter/dongle. So it wouldn't be that expensive. And stanger seems to think the component of the 9600XT would be better than the s-video on the 5700 and they're about the same price.

I was looking at the 6600 not just for the component, but because its an all around great card that would last me a long time.

What do you think about 9600XT component?

[GbrNole]

the last time i used an ati card was strictly via dvi but mlbdude still uses his 9600 via component adapter to his sony hdtv set so maybe he could chime in on how well they work at 480i?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by GbrNole

stanger - the 6600 agp is very available now from multiple manufacturers you just have to look around the net for it.

The 6600GTs are available all over (newegg has quite a few). However AGP versions of the standard (non-GT) 6600 are not yet available AFAIK. The GTs as you note are quite expensive, where the non-GTs should be less (hopefully in the $100-150 range).