Radeon 9200, does it work? (3 Viewers)

[fera]

Hi,

im think about buying a new, mediaportal suitable, graphic card.

Would a Radeon 9200 work good with mp or what would you recommend?

 

[wortelsoft]

If you use the search you'll find loads of these kind of topics. If you buy a new card you should get:

Ati 9550 or better.
nvidia fx5200 or better.

 

[Tech Geek]

Hi,

im think about buying a new, mediaportal suitable, graphic card.

Would a Radeon 9200 work good with mp or what would you recommend?

To be honest, it will work. However, the GPU only supports DirectX 8 accelleration. The DirectX 9 extensions are done mostly with software so the card won't be as fast as a card with DirectX 9 support in hardware. Since some users have complained about CPU usage... why tempt fate.

 

[tkortell]

I can also verify that it works (cause I have one) but I would not buy one.
I had to play with the PCIlatency to get it to work...

R / tk

 

[sri]

If I were you i would take the advice above and buy an ATI card with DX9 support.

And on another topic, if you choose to buy an ATI card, you will have the opportunity to make a VGA-to-ScartRGB cable with an awesome picture quality! I use this and besides getting a bit of overscan, the picture is as good or better than a dvd-player. When you have set up the picture properties correctly, it's hard to tell difference between a hd-tv rip and a real dvd, in compression loss et.c.

It _is_ possible to do this also with a NVidia card but then you have to add some circuitry to the cable to compensate for the hsync+vsync pin that the ATI card has..

Hope it helps, good luck! =)

Edit:
I use a X700 which support some gaming but that isn't necessary for the scartRGB solution. Tutorials on the internet claim that "any" ATI-card will suffice. But as stated earlier, choose one with DX9 support.

 

[fera]

I m using a TFT Computer Display so SCART isnt something i worry about. If i buy a new display its going to be a hdtv one where i also dont have to deal with scart...

Allright. So what would you say: FX 5200 or a ati? (which ati if ati)

Update: Nevermind. I just bought myself a Terratec Mystify 5200 with 128 MB, a TV Out and a DVI out.

I hope that was a good decision! ?

 

[pigboy307]

I have just pdated to a Nvidia 6600 for all of the pure vdeo features and Mpeg decode, I dont think the 5200 has all these ...

(Prepared to be shot down in flames)

 

[Tech Geek]

If you are going to buy an HDTV and want HDTV recording/playback support stick to newer generations of video cards and avoid the bottom end cards to be sure you have enough bandwidth to work.

The 5200/5500 (FX series) or 9550 work fine for standard TV. The 5200/5500 have fewer video playback features and require higher CPU use. The 9550 has more features than the 5200/5500. It actually has the same features as higher end cards prior to the ATi X1000 series & NVidia PureVideo cards.

I suggest a minimum of an X1600 or 6600 based card for HDTV. An X1300PRO *may* also work. These cards will have more video playback features than lower end cards and are fast enough you won't drop frames or have skipping video with MediaPortal.

My own HDTV experience has been less than perfect. I have a Sapphire (ATi) X1300 and it works fine for most HDTV PVR software out of the box but I had problems with MediaPortal. The combination of VMR9 plus Microsoft's video buffering/recording seemed to cause skipping. I had to return the HDTV tuner so I couldn't be sure if it was just a codec problem.

 

[fera]

Are you sure that the graphiccards work with the new copy protection thing?

It allways was my understanding that there has to be a hardware integrated code which the all retail graphiccard dont have? ! ?

 

[Tech Geek]

In the USA, HDTV can be encrypted and a copy protection bit can be enabled to prevent exact digital copies from being made.

Encryption will suffer to same hacking as satellite but I won't discuss it further.

All tuners are supposed to include support for the copy protection bit after June or July of last year I believe. However, a court ruled that the FCC did not have the right to make that ruling and now that is being appealed. What it means is that you can still buy tuners that ignore the copy protection bit until that is worked out. Future driver updates may include it though. As long as it's handled in software you know how effective that will be.