New Video Card AGP

[majorpayne]

I'm looking to get a new video card. Since my 5900 will not use the purevideo drivers.

Does anyone have any ideas which of the AGP cards are going to be the best for me?

[LAGuy]

Cash vs. performance - the 7600GS is a nice choice.

[geekdout]

Hi!

Thought I'd jump in and ask a quick question. I just bought a new Nvidia GeForce 6200 AGP 256MB card, and want to run the Purevision decoder. Should those have been included on the install disk, or do you have to pay for and download/install those separately?

Thx!

[wtg]

Geekdout,

The NVidia PureVideo decoder must be purchased separately.

Majorpayne,

There are a number of threads around here that discuss the best AGP cards. The budget you have and the performance you need are the primary factors. If you are only going to playback standard definition video, your options are wide open.

If you're looking for something to play HD, you need a bit more. Acceptable performance will be tricky with your CPU, though not impossible. There are a number of good choices but spending very much on an AGP video card doesn't make a whole lot of sense either.

[geekdout]

Is the NVidia PureVideo decoder worth buying ($20 for standard) compared to all of the other codecs out there that you can get for free that will run on my card? I know that $20 doesn't seem like much, but all the bits and pieces add up to quite a chunk of change - and if it's not a great improvement over something free I'm not inclined to add to my GBPVR project cost.

I DID pay for DIVX licensing, because my upconvert DVD player is DIVX compatible, and thought that the compression (saved disk space), shorter file transfer times, and conversion to other small player formats would be worthwhile. However, I was freaked out when I found out how long it took to transcode a 2 hour movie. It ran for several hours in the night.

[Deusxmachina]

Is the NVidia PureVideo decoder worth buying ($20 for standard)

Generally, no. Some people love it. And some people such as myself have had annoying playback problems with it, while some other people on here will tell you it's the biggest piece of crap ever sold and they can't believe anyone would use it even if it were free.

[wtg]

geekdout,

I'd definitely try the other decoders that are available before buying PureVideo, and it's available as a 30-day trial so there's no reason to spend money on it without knowing whether it'll work for you.

I'm one of the people that have had great success with it. At the time I was building my machine it offered a very good picture with significantly lower CPU usage than any other decoder I tried, and this on an ATI card. However, there are more free and $$ decoder options available today so you should definitely take your time to see what works for you.

Re: transcoding to Divx, or transcoding to any other format, it's a long and CPU intensive process and then the results can be disappointing at times. Shaving bytes doesn't come free.

[Torque]

IMO, if all you're going to watch is SD content, then the Purevideo decoder works very well. It offered the best picture quality of any of the codecs I tried (cyberlink, intervideo, mpv) with the nVidia video adapters I used (embedded 6150, 6600 256MB, 7100GS) and was close to the lowest for CPU utilization.

I dumped it like a psychotic girlfriend when I started working with HD content. Purevideo was an unpredictable peice of crap with OTA HD.