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Playing HDTV clips on ATI cards
Anyone know what's the lowest speed Athlon system combined with a cheap(est)
128MB ATI card that can play HDTV video clips? I read to play HDTV clips a 128MB card is a requirement. Must be something to do with double or triple buffering the HDTV frames. I've also read that for software playback ATI cards are the best as they have some optimizations for assisting software HDTV playback. Probably more than Nvidia cards. Reason why I'm asking is I'm wondering whether I need to upgrade my motherboard to something a lot better( I have an Abit KT7A which can take up to 2.5ghz barton apparently but at the moment it's only got a 1.4ghz.) Then again I might have to switch to a pentium 4 as one of the software HDTV players I've seen on the net says software playback is only possible with an ATI card combined with a pentium 4 processor. I know that Athlons are not totally out of the picture however - my 1.4ghz chip has a fairly decent effort at playing 720p HDTV video but it is a bit choppy and I'm still using an old 32Mb GFMX card. How much of a performance increase would adding a 128Mb ATI card give? So what's the lowest speed processor that's able to playback HDTV video? I really don't want to upgrade my motherboard until a stable mainboard with the new bus system is out for a decent period of time. |
#2
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On Wed, 08 Oct 2003 13:59:43 GMT
"rms" wrote: Then again I might have to switch to a pentium 4 as one of the software HDTV players I've seen on the net says software playback is only possible with an ATI card combined with a pentium 4 processor. Sounds bogus to me. The only rationale for a P4 is SSE2, and I doubt players rely on that. A somewhat overclocked 2500+ barton would work fine I bet. FWIW, I'm running a FusionHDTV II with an ATI Radeon 8500DV on a 1.4 GHz Athlon and it works fine. Which HDTV player did you have in mind? rms -- -- --John Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net (was jclarke at eye bee em dot net) |
#3
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Then again I might have to switch to a pentium 4 as one of the software
HDTV players I've seen on the net says software playback is only possible with an ATI card combined with a pentium 4 processor. Sounds bogus to me. The only rationale for a P4 is SSE2, and I doubt players rely on that. A somewhat overclocked 2500+ barton would work fine I bet. rms |
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Was that article written by a hardware manufacturer
To play DVD video smoothly you originally needed a 500 MHz processor (P3 class). With the features in modern graphics cards, that seems to be reduced - my own Celeron 1.5 GHz/Radeon 9000 only uses about 20-25% CPU while playing DVDs (suggesting 375MHz should be OK). The top resolution HDTV picture is about 6x the resolution of DVD, so assuming it took 6x the effort (very unlikely) that would require a system 50% faster than mine. That leaves high end Athlons and mid-high end P4s as being perfectly capable. As for 128MB memory, that's just ridiculous. A frame of HDTV resolution would be about 8MB so a 64MB card would easily cope. I'd guess a 2.5 GHz Barton plus an ATi 9000 Pro or better would cope with HDTV perfectly well. "hg" wrote in message ... Anyone know what's the lowest speed Athlon system combined with a cheap(est) 128MB ATI card that can play HDTV video clips? I read to play HDTV clips a 128MB card is a requirement. Must be something to do with double or triple buffering the HDTV frames. I've also read that for software playback ATI cards are the best as they have some optimizations for assisting software HDTV playback. Probably more than Nvidia cards. Reason why I'm asking is I'm wondering whether I need to upgrade my motherboard to something a lot better( I have an Abit KT7A which can take up to 2.5ghz barton apparently but at the moment it's only got a 1.4ghz.) Then again I might have to switch to a pentium 4 as one of the software HDTV players I've seen on the net says software playback is only possible with an ATI card combined with a pentium 4 processor. I know that Athlons are not totally out of the picture however - my 1.4ghz chip has a fairly decent effort at playing 720p HDTV video but it is a bit choppy and I'm still using an old 32Mb GFMX card. How much of a performance increase would adding a 128Mb ATI card give? So what's the lowest speed processor that's able to playback HDTV video? I really don't want to upgrade my motherboard until a stable mainboard with the new bus system is out for a decent period of time. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.516 / Virus Database: 313 - Release Date: 01/09/2003 |
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