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Best card for video playback

Pandobear

Pandobear

Pandobear

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Joined
2 Jun 2006
Posts
827
Location
Aylesbury, Bucks
I was wondering which of the following cards would be best for playing DIVX etc on a media pc:

Radion X1950 256Mb
Radion X1900 xtx 512Mb
radion 2400pro 256Mb
Nvidia 7800gt 256Mb
Nvidia 7800gtx 512Mb
Nvida 6200 128Mb
radion 1250 integrated

I have one of each of these cards, and could test them, but thought I would ask for opinions first. they would be displaying on a 32" tft at 1366 x 780(?)

I would be grateful for suggestions, or if there is a much better card available?
 
I don't think any will give You much in the way of Hardware acceleration for divX

what is the actual codec You want to playback ?
 
Most of the stuff that I have is in xvid and I generally use ffdshow to play back. I had always assumed that the radeons with AVIOVO (?) had hardware acceleration for video, but recently noticed that my 8800GT in my main pc seemed to give better playback than the x1250 in my small media machine, but they are on different screens, so it could be that. Again I only need the card to do video playback no games etc.
 
Pandobear said:
Most of the stuff that I have is in xvid and I generally use ffdshow to play back. I had always assumed that the radeons with AVIOVO (?) had hardware acceleration for video, but recently noticed that my 8800GT in my main pc seemed to give better playback than the x1250 in my small media machine, but they are on different screens, so it could be that. Again I only need the card to do video playback no games etc.
Click to expand...

Well Xvid and lib decompressor in FFDshow will be using the CPU more than GFX card. AVC codecs (advanced video codecs) like H.264 or hacked(X.264) are the killers and there is limited support for hardware acceleration so You end up with software decompressors again
Intel cpus seem better with a Hyperthreading P4 giving much better performance than any single core AMD

What I'm really saying is Your cpu is going to be more important than the GFX Card ;) and 1366X768 is not a big ask of any modern GFX card
 
Thanks for the advice, the machine is a Q6600 with 4Gb ram on a 975 board, running Windows Vista x64 Ultimate, so I should have plenty of processing power. I had been running Server 2008 when comparing the cards, and perhaps that made a difference comparing it to Vista
 
2400 pro should be good under windows, i've got one myself in a htpc, but that's running linux, and i can say the drivers are not quite there yet. it works but not everything is flawless, probably just a matter of waiting for the drivers to mature.
 
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