G400 vs Radeon 7200

[Heiney]

I pulled out my glorious G400MAX the other day and was using it on my main home comp.

2D Desktop was as sharp as usual. However, videos in windows had this horrible down scaling that looked like a plain pixel resize.

My old Radeon 7200 has equally sharp desktop 2D (the ramdac is 360mhz too, but we all know it's the filters that count.). But, the Radeon's video scaling is just stunningly superior to the G400. I think the G400 was also giving me a random reboot thing that showed up every couple days too. The G400 must not like my KT333 board.

Sadly, I had to re-retire the G400 in favor of the Radeon 7200

BTW, I had been using this G400MAX as a TV-out card too. I used it for most of Spring. It really wasn't all that impressive, honestly. The G400's overlay limitations are a real pain and the image quality is less bright and contrasty than the PCI Radeon SDR I replaced it with....That was the first time I tried a G400 for TVOut, and I was going on all the good things I've heard about the card's ability in this area.

[Wombat]

There's a G4xx dshow filter that you probably didn't configure.

Also, if you didn't uninstall ATI's drivers, they were probably messing with the Matrox card and causing the reboots.

[Ribbit]

I don't know why, but video card overlays always seem to look like crap unless you turn their filters on. I've noticed this on the G400, G450, and my FireGL 8800 under X, and the G-cards in Windows (haven't played video with the FireGL in Windows). The weird thing is they look much better when the video is actually being scaled. The really weird thing is that Matrox don't bother to set the appropriate register bit in their drivers (and it really is just one or two bits to set on those cards), so video in a windows looks bad and it reflect on them and their card.

Playing unscaled video in software without any filtering looks fine. Why do overlays mess it up?