Is G400 DVD hard or soft?

[moreau]

OK,

I thought that it was software, judging from this: http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/m...0/features.htm
Notice under DVDMax where it says (paraphrasing) 'our hardware does some stuff so that it is like hardware'.
But read this: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardwar...e_g400/2.shtml
Just above the bumpmapped picture, sharky claims Hardware.

Anyone care to shed some light?

Mind you, I don't care that it is soft, since most posts here say the output is top quality, and as long as you aren't running a P75 like my brother, it won't matter. !)

Thanks...

[Kruzin]

It's mostly software, but a few things (like scaling I think) are handled in hardware...so Matrox calls it "partial hardware" decoding...

[Himself]

It's hard on the outside, soft in the middle, melts in your mouth, not in your hand.

No, the G400 doesn't have what anybody would call real DVD decoding on board. It does have nice DVD features like DVD max though if you have dual head, and it is generally a faster 2D card so that helps.

Hmm, I know (well, read) that T&L would be too slow for the WARP engine but I wonder if it could be wired to partially decode DVD?
(I'll put that on the list of things not to wait for, just after hell freezing over.)

[Gurm]

Moreau:

Of all of the currently available cards, the G400 is second in DVD output only to the ATI cards. The ATI Rage PRO is the equal of the G400 in this arena (if not being slightly better) and the Rage128 is substantially better, since it does Inverse Discrete Cosine Transforms (IDCT).

Himself:

In answer to your wondering... I recall that people said that the WARP engine wasn't particularly good at floating point operations. With the exception of the upscaling, MUCH of DVD decoding is floating point (see IDCT above, heh). However you COULD probably use it to interpolate frames... but... that would hardly gain you any speed, since it is such a small part of the DVD decoding process.

- Gurm

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