G450 and DVD playback

[jdavis3-7]

OK here;s a simple one I bought an ATI Radeon 64 Mb DDR VIVO card even though rumours of bad drivers were floating about. I wanted DVD playback and video in.. well the rumours of bad drivers is true and aside from the stable intial set the rest are buggy crap, and the video in on the stable set isnt reliable. I had a 32 Mb Matrox G400 and loved the card even though it could have been snappier... but am not a big 3d gamer so no matter.

How GOOD is the G450 on DVD playbackcompared to the ATI when it is working correctly? Since the video in isnt working anyway I can get the Matrox for $100 less. SO if its DVD is as good as the ATI then no reaosn not to return to Matrox!

[dZeus]

the ATI card does hardware MC and iDTC.. I don't know if that has any effect on visual quality or only on MPEG-2 decoding CPU utilisation, but the G4x0 overlay and videoscaling are ok

[Indiana]

ATIs hardware motion compensation uses more oversampling steps (don't know the exact technical name) than what software DVD players do. This will theoretically result in smoother playback.

That said I have access to a notebook with ATI gfx (Rage mobility) and the G400 DVD playback is as good as the ATI one (if not better due to the overall sharper output of the G400). However on the ATI DVD-playback uses near to no CPU-cycles while with the G400 you should have a >=400MHz CPU. If you want to work/surf/whatever on one monitor while watching DVDs on the other one, better look for something in the 800MHz region.
CPU-usage as well as picture-quality will vary quite a bit depending on the DVD player software you use. Cinemaster is very fast but has not the best quality while WinDVD delivers the by far best image but also uses more CPU-power. YMMV.

[jdavis3-7]

Thanks for the information. I had a G400 but cascaded it down to the lower tiered PC to help boost it's performance and went with the Radeon 64 Mb DDR card. I have a 1 GHz Athlon so cpu speed isnt an issue. My Matrox was very stable and I got spoiled by that and since am not a huge 3D gamer the lack of 3D speed wasnt that big of deal. The Radeon card is faster.. am starting to feel the difference the longer I have it and thus going to a G450 may not be the ideal solution since it is basically a G400 made prettier. I got my DVD playback problems fixed last night by reinstalling the original drivers. ATI's drivers are lacking without question but the card itself is plenty fast and the DVD playback is smooth and seems almost movie like with exception of the Warner Bros start up on the Matrix. I can see the interlacing jitters on the emblem but outside of that it runs very smoothly. I tried the demo version of WinDVD and had same interlacing jitters.. pic quality seemed alittle better than the AT player but sound sucked.. course I didnt have the newer version of WinDVD loaded and it ended up hosing my system cause it left behind a codec that timed out in 5 minutes. I still have 2 week son this board before I can no longer return it so am going to weigh my options carefully. I wish I knew when the G800 was actually going to materialize simply because Matrox does need to bump thier cards up a level. The Radeon 2D quality is on par with the G400 and is fast.. but its drivers are less than perfect. Still at $134.95 the G450 seems a sweet deal. Is the Matrox Soft DVD player decent or is it basically the same program as the ATI player?

[Rags]

I think ATI bundles the Cinemaster 2000 DVD player as well.

Rags