9400GT - video success at last!

[johnsonx42]

After suffering with video tearing and non-accelerated 1080i playback for months with my Radeon HD4550, I went over to the green team. I've read here that the Radeon HD3450/3650 are good HTPC cards and don't suffer the problems of the HD4000 series, but I wanted a card I could just pick up at (and return to) my local Fry's, and they don't carry any HD3000 cards at all any more.

First I tried the on-board video of my GeForce 6100 mainboard via a KWorld scan converter - no good, still tearing, 1080i still non-accelerated (or not accelerated enough). The video quality of the scan converter was ok, nothing to get excited about, but far better than the eVGA 8400gs I'll mention in a moment.

Then I bought a GeForce 7200GS - no good, the card didn't work at all. No idea if the card was defective, or if it just had some compatibility issue with my mainboard.

Then I bought an eVGA GeForce 8400gs. It had very poor S-Video out quality. The performance was better, but 1080i was still not well accelerated at all. Adding insult, the fan could be heard all the way down the hall.

Tonight I installed a PNY GeForce 9400gt. At last, good results. 1080i seems to be accelerated, looks good, no de-interlacing problems, fan is quiet. With VMR9 FSE there's no tearing or stutter at all; on VMR9 Custom there is a very slight tear on 1080i channels from time to time, but nothing I'm going to complain about. I'm able to run at 1024x768 and get quasi-HD quality on my 61" SD bigscreen (yes, I know SVideo doesn't truly give me 1024x768, but I can definitely see the improvement vs 640x480 on HD channels)

I'd say the HD4550 still had better image quality on S-Video out, but the PNY 9400GT is pretty decent (far superior to whatever garbage eVGA used on that 8400gs). The TV tuning options in the nVidia control panel are a bit touchy, sometimes adjusting one thing will break something else; ATI Catalyst Control Center was comparitively a joy. But I've got it adjusted now so hopefully that will be the end of it.

Just filing my report for the potential benefit for those on a video card hunt. Everyone seems to have different experiences though; I've seen several mentions of people quite happy with the 8400gs, but it didn't work for me.

edit: final piece of the puzzle - set 'wait for vertical sync' to 'force on' in 3d settings; that seems to have cured the tearing (I was starting to see more tearing, getting a bit disappointed until I remembered that setting)

[pBS]

good deal...one day the 4xxx cards will work, but who's willing to wait around?
i've seen some new mb's with a NV 9300 onboard and takes Intel CPU!
so good to hear you're having good results without too much hassle..
btw, what driver version are you using?
no component input to the tv? that can actually get a higher resolution usually..
my 60" hd tv has only component inputs, but they allow 1080i...not all can accept higher resolutions, but usually better looking than svideo..
[even if just going up to 480p from 480i]

[pBS]

could you please post a dxvachecker output? curious as to the hardware capabilities of this card...
dxva1 vs. dxva2
just hoping they didn't leave anything out of v1 implementation...[1=XP] [dxva2=vista]
stupid intel chipset only does v2...

[johnsonx42]

where to get dxvachecker?

[johnsonx42]

no component input to the tv? that can actually get a higher resolution usually..
my 60" hd tv has only component inputs, but they allow 1080i...not all can accept higher resolutions, but usually better looking than svideo..
[even if just going up to 480p from 480i]

My TV is strictly SD, it will ONLY take 480i on the component inputs. The video card will only allow 640x480 resolution in windows with component out set for 480i timing. Somehow the video cards can cheat and do 1024x768 over svideo, but can't cheat the same way via component.

One day I will of course get a 1080p HD display, but as long as the 61" SD set keeps working and money isn't falling off trees it will have to do.

[sub]

My TV is strictly SD, it will ONLY take 480i on the component inputs. The video card will only allow 640x480 resolution in windows with component out set for 480i timing. Somehow the video cards can cheat and do 1024x768 over svideo, but can't cheat the same way via component.

When it does this, its only putting out 720x480 over svideo. It down sizes the 1024x768 to normal NTSC resolution before sending it out over svideo.

[johnsonx42]

When it does this, its only putting out 720x480 over svideo. It down sizes the 1024x768 to normal NTSC resolution before sending it out over svideo.

Yes, I gathered that was the cheat... but somehow the end result looks better than outputting 720x480 directly. The down-scaling probably introduces a natural anti-aliasing effect. The GB-PVR menus and text look much better at 1024x768 as well. Finally, I use a custom task to access hulu.com via IE, and hulu is optimized for 1024x768.

I still wonder though if it can downscale 1024x768 to 480i on SVideo, why can't it do it on Component? I suppose it may just be a case of "not implemented that way" rather than "can't".

[pBS]

here tis...it's from a japanese web site but it's in english...

http://bluesky23.hp.infoseek.co.jp/dxvac...10.1.0.zip

[johnsonx42]

after a few weeks of use, I gave up on the 9400GT and returned it. It was definitively better than the HD4550, but it had peculiarities of it's own. While the 720p and 1080i HD channels played great (with some slight tearing on 1080i channels), a couple of SD channels had really peculiar frame-jumps: every 5-10 seconds it'd show a single frame from several frames back in the file. This would frequently happen on a scene change, but sometimes in mid-scene. It also happened on some DVD rips and on some mpeg files I converted from my old DirecTiVo. This happened with several different codecs, so it was something in the driver (I thought maybe it was inverse telecine, but I turned that off to no avail).

so, I'm back to the HD4550, using Cyberlink PDVD8 decoder with hardware acceleration turned off. it doesn't de-interlace quite right on some channels, and has some tearing on interlaced channels, but it's better than paying $60 for another card that introduces new problems.