What AGP Video Card Do You Use For HDTV?

[jh61408]

The resolution was always set on my at 1920x1080, As for the 1280x1080 was a typo on my part. I did not catch that at first, Sorry for the confusion. But the original problem was with it set at the correct 1920x1080 it would not scale properly to fit the screen.

I know alot of LCD's out their have setting in them to adjust scaling problems, but mine does not.

[rtiangha]

My only Concern and maybe it is my TV. It is a 37" LCD. But the screen has about a 1/4" between the Actual and what is displayed. So in other words it does not cover the TV all the way. I do not have the Catalyst control center installed as i have read it is more problems than what it is worth installed,And I do not think it will stretch the display to fill the screen all the way any way.

AMD/ATI originally set the drivers to display certain types of HD DVD and Blu-ray content to a maximum resolution of 1600x1200. This was because they weren't sure if processing/deinterlacing 1080i content and above would choke the card (especially the 2400) at higher resolutions. This will be fixed in Catalyst 7.11.

If you don't care to wait, there's a registry setting you can change so that it'll display full screen. You'll need to set "VForceMaxResSize"="2800000" which is good enough for 1920 across. If you've got a 2500x1600 display, you'll need to set it higher.

Anyways, more details here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost....count=2121

If people want updates about this card, I'll tell you my story.

Bought a Diamond AGP 2600 Pro 512MB DDR2 RAM for use in my HTPC (specs are in my signature, mainly an nforce2 based board with an AthlonXP 2500+ Barton).

Unfortunately, changes that AMD/ATI made in their drivers from 7.8 onwards regarding Smartgart has broken Direct 3D on this machine (the D3D tests in dxdiag all fail). To be fair, it has effected D3D across ALL of their AGP cards across all product lines for certain people running certain configurations. It hasn't been fixed yet, as of 7.10. Many people who own AGP ATI cards and are experiencing the same problems are running 7.7 since it's the only driver that still has working D3D for them.

The official drivers don't have any inf entries for AGP 2XXX cards from any manufacturer. You'll either have to mod the drivers yourself, use the latest Omega Drivers (although they're missing an entry for the AGP 2600 pro), or some manufacturers (GeCube, Visontek, Sapphire are the ones that come to mind) have released drivers that are either modded 7.10 or somewhere inbetween 7.10 and 7.11.

I'm running 7.7 because D3D is broken on anything higher (heck, the drivers that shipped on the CD don't even work on this machine and Diamond doesn't have any new drivers on their website; they're still stuck on 6.X). However, the card works perfectly fine on XP with 7.8-7.10 on my Asrock 4coredual-vsta, although I have to throttle down AGP to 4x to get rid of rendering errors in VMR9 and DirectX 8 and 9 (D3D in dxdiag tests show corruption and the main menu in PVRX2 is messed up when using VMR9).

The UVD doesn't work on 7.7 as it outputs garbage to the display on both of my systems. On the Asrock system, the UVD works wonderfully on 7.8 and above, although I have to do the registry tweak above to get the video to display fully on my 1920x1200 display. On my main system in my signature, UVD in 7.8 and above crashes PowerDVD, although since Direct3D doesn't even work properly, I'm not surprised.

Other than the bugs that the registry tweaks fix, I'm fighting two other bugs. One is that with HD DVDs in PowerDVD, hardware acceleration (when it's working) is enabled no matter what. This is a known issue. The other is that PowerDVD crashes when playing certain types of HD content. This is also a known issue in AMD's knowledge base.

So as it stands right now, for me, to get the whole thing to work, I have to upgrade my system to my Core2Duo based machine, which kind of defeats the intent and purpose of getting this card.

I'm confident the driver issues will sort themselves out, however, with the lack of leaked betas and hotfixes (going on 3 months now), I'm not sure if things will all be fixed in 7.11. Realistically, probably 7.12 or 8.1. The UVD and D3D problems sound like they're separate problems.

Anyways, if I were waiting to buy this card again, I'd at least wait until inf entries make it into the official drivers (because as of now, the official drivers don't officially support the AGP variants of the 2XXX series) and definitely wait until the Direct3D issues have been fixed in the drivers.

So in other words, hold off until you hear widespread reports of everything working the way it should (especially the UVD stuff, if you're like me and this is the main reason why you're buying this card). Otherwise, it's not worth the time in trying to get it to work and you'll just become disappointed like me. UVD may work for some people (ex. like on my Asrock system), but right now, it really doesn't work for others (ex. like on my nforce2 system) and the real kicker is that you won't know until you try. The price will probably go down too if you wait. For example, I bought the Diamond card for about $140, but now I can get a Sapphire card for $100. That's less than an month after I had originally bought it. I wasn't impressed, especially since I'm still not watching HD DVDs on this machine like I had originally intended. If I'd had known how much trouble this would all have been, I would have just stuck with my Nvidia 6600GT and waited until after January to look into upgrading.

[nbarsley]

Thanks for the update. Will you keep us posted?

[bckappen]

The issues mentioned by rtiangha could be specific to that hardware combination. I recently upgraded from GeForce FX 5200, which was struggling to keep up with HD playback, to HIS Radeon X1650 PRO AGP card. This card is working great on my Athlon 64 2800 PC for HD playback. I just now checked the Catalyst version - it is 7.8. Checked Direct3D tests in dxdiag and no problems. Don't know if HIS did any modifications to the 7.8 drivers.

[stustunz]

that post pretty much sums up my ati2400 card
in my opinion i will stick to nvidia for ever now
i will never buy another ati card ever
there drivers suck and the cards ati2xxx should have never been released
untill they had the drivers sorted

[waybeyond]

Crazy... ststunz's post is exactly how I feel, except about Nvidia. I'd been a long time ATI user until 3 months ago and never, not once, had a problem. I "upgraded" my old Radeon 9600XT to a GeForce 7600GT AGP. Things were awesome at first. The difference was amazing. Then I started trying to view HD content and that's when it got fun. Occasionally I get a BSOD relating that nv4_disp.dll (Nvidia's directx driver) has caused an infinite loop and so Windows XP is halting to prevent any damage. I've tried and tried to fix this problem and it's taken me nearly 3 weeks... and I'm still not sure if it's fixed or just lying in wait. Google nv4_disp.dll and you'll see posts spanning from 2001 to today's top of the line 8800 Ultra (or whatever it is now) with no consistent fix. There's no rhyme or reason to the problem and Nvidia doesn't even acknowledge that there is a problem. For some people, after uninstalling/reinstalling different driver versions it fixes it. For some, it's cooling. For others it's bad RAM, PSU, software conflicts... Others never find the solution and ditch the card for ATI...

I'm sure it's a very small percentage of people this happens to or else Nvidia would do something about it. Regardless, it's left a seriously bad taste in my mouth for anything coming from Nvidia. Unless I switch to Linux (no directx, no problem), my next video card is coming from ATI/AMD.

[stustunz]

i had a 9800xt but i fried it trying to overclock it
back then they were still good cards with good drivers

did you install your nvidia card on fresh install?

to tell you the truth if there was another video card brand i would probably give it a go

[rtiangha]

The issues mentioned by rtiangha could be specific to that hardware combination. I recently upgraded from GeForce FX 5200, which was struggling to keep up with HD playback, to HIS Radeon X1650 PRO AGP card. This card is working great on my Athlon 64 2800 PC for HD playback. I just now checked the Catalyst version - it is 7.8. Checked Direct3D tests in dxdiag and no problems. Don't know if HIS did any modifications to the 7.8 drivers.

Yes, like I said (or tried to say anyways), it seems to be motherboard chipset specific.

nforce2 boards are definitely affected, and it appears that some older Via and Sis based chipsets are affected too. Not sure if it affects AMD boards only. It seems that Intel based boards are fine, although not sure if Sis or Via based Intel boards exhibit the same problems.

From the symptoms, it really looks like AMD QA tested on newer AGP boards (2005 and newer) and neglected some of the older, more popular boards. Looking at how long it's taken for a fix to appear, it looks like they're still working on the legacy boards (assuming they're doing any work at all) and that it probably isn't a trivial problem (otherwise, a hotfix would have been released by now). In fact, for the longest time, the AMD driver team couldn't replicate the problem, despite being inundated with reports of D3D failing on certain AGP set ups.

If you've got a board that runs an Athlon64 or newer, or was created around the same time as boards with PCI-E started appearing, then chances are, D3D will probably work for you with 7.8 or higher.

If your chipset has a driver update, that might make it work. For example, someone with an nforce3 was having the same problems, but as soon as they updated to the latest official chipset driver, 7.8 and onwards worked. Unfortunately, there's nothing newer for the nforce2, and even the unofficial driver remixes have no effect.

D3D is working in 7.7 though, so this is how I know that it's possible to fix all this. The question is whether or not ATI/AMD is motivated enough to do it. The next few driver releases will tell.

I'll keep people updated for as long as I stay with this set up, if people are really interested in what I'm going through. I've actually ordered a cheap E2140 and intend to make this Asrock board my new HD HTPC and retire my current HTPC to become a Linux file server. However, I doubt I'll get to this project any time soon and I want to wait until next payday to get some 4GB RAM upgrades to go with this new motherboard I bought that will now become my main work station instead of the Asrock.

Spent more money (and time) on this project than I intended; could probably have spent less on an Xbox360 with HDMI port and be done with it as my HD DVD player. Oh well.

[rtiangha]

that post pretty much sums up my ati2400 card
in my opinion i will stick to nvidia for ever now
i will never buy another ati card ever
there drivers suck and the cards ati2xxx should have never been released
untill they had the drivers sorted

Yes, agreed. There probably was a reason why these AGP cards were so scarce from July-October. They were probably released too early. 3 months and counting without official support from an official driver is kind of ridiculous. Makes me wonder if these cards were released 3-4 months too early.

The good thing about my case is that I know the hardware works as advertised, as it works on my newer system. The crappy things is that I don't know if AMD/ATI is motivated enough to fix these problems, considering that AGP is old tech. I hope so, though. These cards are easy money for them (and lord knows AMD could use the financial help these days), but only if they work as advertised.

You know, I never put much stock in WHQL certification before, but with all these issues I've been having with this set up, I think that if the driver were to pass WHQL with the AGP HD2XXX cards, then that would be a good indication that most of the issues have been fixed in the driver, as I'm sure that passing some basic D3D tests is part of getting WHQL. That's probably the main reason why there are no inf entries in the official drivers as of yet; they don't even pass basic testing (at least, I hope that's the reason and not because they forgot or that the AMD driver team is not coordinated with their Channel partners in terms of timetables and release schedules).

[stustunz]

my problem is probably different than yours
mine a was pcie card but the drivers were crap the new ones didnt recongnise my card
it just went on and on so i gave up as the picture on SD mpeg was worse than my old card
i think its not just agp its the xp vista thing aswell
so if you are using agp and xp your screwed

its just a mess really
in my opinion if i made something this useless and sold here in new zealand i would be shut down for false advertising