What AGP Video Card Do You Use For HDTV?

[nbarsley]

Have the drivers improved fro the AGP 2600s? I'm still planning on buying one, but I figured I'd wait until things have settled down a little. BrFish- How did it go with your xmas purchase?

[JonnyCam]

I've just ordered the Sapphire HD2600XT, 256MB AGP.

Should arrive tomorrow or Friday, and I'll let you know how I get on.

Cheers

[JonnyCam]

Well, it's crap.

You can't install the latest drivers because they do not support AGP. I downloaded the drivers from the Sapphie website, and still get some stability problems.

Playing a H264 HD file in PowerDVD works, but at one point the playback freezes, I can move the mouse, but nothing responds - then my LCD switches off, and I have to hardreset to get back to windows. The Cyberlink decoder doesn't seem to work too well in GBVPR, brings up the first frame, and if I askip it display the frame related to the timeline - but no playback as such.

The taskbar seems to be disappearing from desktop and all of my icons, sometimes they come back.

Seems like there is going to be issues with these cards as I think AGP was an afterthought.

Might see about returning it, and I have reg'd to wait for a pre-order of the popcornhour, and I'll use that for my HD playback.

[sub]

The drivers are definitely on the crappy side, but I've got it working well enough to stick with it in two machines. One is AGP (Visiontek HD 2600 Pro), and is using the Visiontek 8.43 drivers. I think they were prerelease of the ATI 7.11 catalyst drivers.

My AGP board is in a custom Hushtechnologies case which couldnt be upgraded to PCIe, so I had to stick with AGP, and these ATI cards were the only way I was going to get hardware acceleration for our pending H.264 DVB-T system. The nvidia cards do not support H.264 acceleration with their AGP models, so it didnt provide me any alternative.

I definitely had a painful experience getting things setup on the AGP box, but with these current drivers I'm actually getting pretty good results, and really low CPU usage when I view these DVB-T trials. I'm not going to bother trying to upgrade these drivers unless I hear things have drasticly improvide in future drivers.

This first one worked well enough for me that when I bought a new PCI Express machine recently I got a second ATI 2600 Pro, though this time PCIe.

[JonnyCam]

Oh well, I guess I'll be doing some more plaing tonight then - I wonder if I could try the Vision drivers?

Any idea of why the file would play in PowerDVD, but only still frames in GBPVR?

[sub]

The Cyberlink decoders work ok for me. Play one of these files then post the pvrx2.exe-native.log and I'll check which directshow filters are being used.

[probeGT]

OK, so based on this thread and some other research, I purchased an AGP HD2600Pro for my Dell 4600 2.8 GHz P4 HT with 756 megs. I was thinking (hoping?) that this rig would do 720p video with no problem, but so far that's not the case.

The issue is that whenever I've gotten a video and audio codec that work, I get stuttering on video and audio. . . actually the audio is way more annoying than the video, it's like staccato--very annoying, and video is doing it too. The video lan VLC media player plays this stuff fine on this machine, although not as large i full screen mode, and I like GB much better. Standard def plays fine on GB, and if I set up a non-functioning audio codec, the high-def video plays fine. Just won't do video and audio together.

I've tried the driver sub suggested, and also the pure video drivers. No dice. I also tried adding 512 Megs of system RAM with no difference. I even went into the ATI panel and cranked up overclocking on the card.

What do we think? Seems to me this rig ought to be able to do this, no?

Thanks!

Jim

EDIT: BTW, this does the same thing whether I'm in full-screen or if squish video down into a small window.

[JonnyCam]

The Cyberlink decoders work ok for me. Play one of these files then post the pvrx2.exe-native.log and I'll check which directshow filters are being used.

Well, I installed some more drivers, and on that CSI sample you sent me - I was able to get motion playback in PVRX2, but only afater I skipped through to about 1:18 (of about 1:30) then it actually plays, and when I askip back towards the start of the file - it plays, although with some corruption.

I notice that the logs show it trying to display a video texture of 1920x1080 - would this be an issue as my machine is set to the LCD native? (1360x768)

Logs are attached.

[sub]

2008-01-13 11:08:17.328 VERBOSE Graph contains the following filters:
2008-01-13 11:08:17.328 VERBOSE - Default DirectSound Device
2008-01-13 11:08:17.328 VERBOSE - Video Renderer
2008-01-13 11:08:17.328 VERBOSE - AC3Filter
2008-01-13 11:08:17.328 VERBOSE - CyberLink H.264/AVC Decoder (PDVD7.x)
2008-01-13 11:08:17.328 VERBOSE - MPEG Layer-3 Decoder
2008-01-13 11:08:17.328 VERBOSE - D:\TV3_20071218120000.ts

There is strangely two audio decoders in there, so that is probably something to do with it. It might be worth trying to resolve that - maybe temporarily disable/uninstall AC3Filter.

[hasso]

One is AGP (Visiontek HD 2600 Pro), and is using the Visiontek 8.43 drivers.

So, do you think there's any chance of using one of these with my ageing system (AMD XP2800+) to get NZ DVB-T (non-choppy) playback or is it time to upgrade (sigh). I would assume that my present AGP card with the XP2800+ processor isn't going to cut it.