ATI Radeon HD 2X00 (2400,2600,2900) series owners thread

[ChuckKahn]

I used methods in post #1954 & #1956 to make changes to some files from ATI Official 7.10 driver (in fact, other drivers before 7.10)

For Visiontek cards, I always check following link, the newest one is always on top, there is 7.10 there, I believe should support visiontek, but I didn't try visiontek 7.10 since ATI official 7.10 is working for me now

Well I tried Visiontek's 7.10 driver and the AVIVO window in the Catalyst Control Center is black. So I ran the ATI Uninstall Utility and Driver Cleaner Pro on all ATI items but even after that, CCleaner's Uninstall Tool still lists a whole bunch of Catalyst items that are not listed in Windows Add or Remove Programs list:

Catalyst Control Center Graphics Full Existing
Catalyst Control Center Graphics Full New
Catalyst Control Center Graphics Light
Catalyst Control Center Graphics Previews Common
Catalyst Control Center Localization Chinese Standard
Catalyst Control Center Localization French
Catalyst Control Center Localization German
Catalyst Control Center Localization Spanish
CCC Help Chinese Standard
CCC Help English
CCC Help French
CCC Help German
CCC Help Spanish
ccc-core-preinstall
ccc-core-static
ccc-utility

Why does Add or Remove not see them but CCleaner does? And why didn't the ATI uninstall utility remove them?

[ChuckKahn]

I used methods in post #1954 & #1956 to make changes to some files from ATI Official 7.10 driver (in fact, other drivers before 7.10)

I've followed the methods for ATI's 7.10 driver, and the Avivo Video Preview in CCC is black. (It's supposed to be an ATI flag, right?)

[originalsnuffy]

Arfster (and everybody else too!),

Thanks for your helpful suggestions. I have now installed quicktime alternative 1.90, and uninstalled quicktime itself. Also put in haali/matroska splitter, but did not install any new h.264 drivers. Thus, in my system, cyberlink PowerDVD is the source for h.264 video codecs and aac sound.

I can now play .mov files in media player classic 6.4, vlc player (latest version), and, yes, windows media player. It looks like there is no h.264 hardware acceleration using the media player classic or vlc. But....in windows media player..hardware acceleration seems to work!

The downside...on some files .mov playback using windows media player as the default results in the BSOD. Windows reports the problem as being with ATI drivers...but with all the non-standard drivers in the system, who really knows? One thing I think is weird is that on my system it is really easy to have a thorough system crash. I always thought that a benefit of xp and vista was supposed to be a good capability to recover from system errors. Sure does not seem to be a feature of vista in particular.

One nice benefit of using quicktime alternative is that I can now easily download .mov demonstration files from the BBC media gallery website. With quicktime, I think I would have needed to have the pro version, or manually copy down the urls for each clip and paste them into firefox.

Elephants dream .avi now players in vlc, which was broken before. It won't play in windows media classic or windows media player, and I get some artifacts that make me think that hardware acceleration is not working.

[mike infinity]

mike infinity how do you playback h264 material?
You can play with hardware acceleration h264 files? movie trailers in .mov for example?

I havn't tried .mov files. However AVCHD files from my sony camcorder is a h.264 container (m2ts files) that the cyberlink decoder can decode with hardware acceleration.

In fact, SW decoding...even on a quad core vista machine...gives juddery playback with these files.

Its worth noting that I can also get good playback with purevideo on my nvidia 7800gs agp (with purevideo HW acceleration) on a lowly p4.

Actually i can accelerate mpeg2 1080i .ts files with winodws media player and latest beta drivers for AGP cards.

I havn't tried this. I have tried 1080p, 720p mkv files though...it works well enough with SW acceleration but no dice on HW acceleration (as many posters have indicated).

My problem is that when my card is set to output at 1080i to my hdtv, the output it jittery (and unwatchable) even though HW acceleration is still apparently working.

[arfster]

I can now play .mov files in media player classic 6.4, vlc player (latest version), and, yes, windows media player. It looks like there is no h.264 hardware acceleration using the media player classic or vlc. But....in windows media player..hardware acceleration seems to work!


Cool. The reason it doesn't accelerate in VLC is that it's a self-contained media player that doesn't support acceleration, and doesn't use external directshow codecs. MPC usually does, but for mov files appears not to.


The downside...on some files .mov playback using windows media player as the default results in the BSOD.


BSOD=hardware problem, or _completely_ screwed up drivers. Personally I've never seen Vista bsod, and I really screw with operating systems :-)


Elephants dream .avi now players in vlc, which was broken before. It won't play in windows media classic or windows media player, and I get some artifacts that make me think that hardware acceleration is not working.

Any idea what video format it is? AVI is just the container type (think of it as the external shell to the audio/video/subtitle contents), like mkv/mp4 and co - it could have several different types of video in it.

[Jan A]

First of all thanks to Arfster and ExDeus for there work.
Had everything working now(DVD on XP MCE) with the reg tweaks, so it was time for calibration of my displays. I think i have installed the Avivo decoder (had the Nvidia before). My problem is that i can not see the below black material on DVE (digital video essentials)? Where do i fix this clipping?

[ken52787]

For those asking about quicktime decoding, I got it to work by installing quicktime alternative, and then renaming the extension from .mov to .hdmov, and then opening in MPC. I'm not sure what changing the extension does, but it does help. Using .mov, it opens with Quicktime filters and decodes slowly; while using .hdmov allows me to use any directshow filters that I want.

[DJBlu]

Hi all,

Just finished reading all the posts on this thread and am still unable to get h264 accelerated @ 1080p with the Sapphire HD2600XT.

I am running Vista 32bit with 7.10 drivers using PowerDVD v7.3.3319

720p works with the occasional frame drop but anything higher produces a green screen.

I have added all the reg tweaks and am stuck as what to do.

Any advice would be great.

Thanks in advance.

[Gr8Motz]

Hi guys,

Looking for some help for a recently installed Saphire ATI Radeon 2600HD Pro 512MB AGP. Installation went ok from the disk but then I wanted to install the latest driver and Catalyst from ATI and although I uninstalled it through the ATI uninstall application, when I want to install either the new drive or the complete Catlyst package it gives me this error:

Severe: Setup did not find a driver compatible with your hardware or operating system.Setup will not exit.

The files I'm trying to install are: 7-10_xp32_dd_53250 for the driver
and 7-10_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_53250 for the complete package including driver and new Catalyst.

Card is now on the driver that came with the disk in the original package.
Any ideas or suggestions?
Thanks

[originalsnuffy]

It turns out the in media player classic one can adjust the default codecs. I changed a few to direct show, and now the playback of most of the .mov files has improved dramatically.

I have been monkeying with this one files called elephants dream, which I believe is h.264. (There are multiple versions of this material--I know there is also a windows media video version). With the changes I made to media player classic, I can now play it. This file was created using primarily common license sources (in fact I think it has a creattive commons license for usage).. It looks like the sound is actually in 5.1 surround, which I never knew until media player classic started rendering it.

However, now the audio and video have severe lags on this particular source. Any thoughts on what I should adjust?

I am definitely getting closer to a stable codec situation with the 2400. However, I still get BSOD crashes. Invariably, vista "blames" the crashes on problems with the ATI drivers (I am at 7.10).

[5040wannaB]

A quick question: I have two HD2600XTs in my HTPC. For video playback, do the 3D settings in CCC have any effect? If so, can someone recommend settings for AA, AF and the like? Thanks.

[Tsunami2000]

Hey everybody. I just bought a MSI HD2600XT 512MB GDDR3 for my new HP m9000t desktop. I'm using the DVI->HDMI to my Samsung LNS4095D TV. I researched the card for weeks and it seemed like the perfect HD solution.

I just hooked it all up though and the picture is horrendous!

It looks like it's putting out about 64 colors. For example, the light blue boxes on this page are just a spread of white and blue pixels - huge blocks, nothing seemless.

Any ideas what could be wrong?? The driver version I have is: 8.421.0.0 and I have Catalyst 7.10.

THANKS!!!

[Fuz]

Hey everybody. I just bought a MSI HD2600XT 512MB GDDR3 for my new HP m9000t desktop. I'm using the DVI->HDMI to my Samsung LNS4095D TV. I researched the card for weeks and it seemed like the perfect HD solution.

I just hooked it all up though and the picture is horrendous!

It looks like it's putting out about 64 colors. For example, the light blue boxes on this page are just a spread of white and blue pixels - huge blocks, nothing seemless.

Any ideas what could be wrong?? The driver version I have is: 8.421.0.0 and I have Catalyst 7.10.

THANKS!!!

Has the card ever worked for you, or did this happen upon first boot? If its the first time you've booted up, check the device manager and see if there is a yellow exclamation mark on the video adapter? If there is, no drivers are going to help you.

I have seen this happen a few times with different video cards on various setups. It is most probably a problem is resources, in particular IRQ issues.

Try freeing up some resources by disabling anything you don't need in the bios settings (ie serial and parallel ports). This some times works, otherwise, it could be one of a million problems.... In the past, it usually meant time for a new mobo.

Good luck.

Fuz.

[arfster]

Djblu:
"Just finished reading all the posts on this thread and am still unable to get h264 accelerated @ 1080p with the Sapphire HD2600XT."

Need to know what codecs/players you're using, and what container file of h264 (mkv? ts? Bluray?)


Gr8motz:
"Looking for some help for a recently installed Saphire ATI Radeon 2600HD Pro 512MB AGP"

The ATI drivers only support PCIE - you need to get some from the maker of your card. Alternatively visiontek are worth a shot, these are beta 7.11:
http://www.visiontek.com/teksupport/drivers/DOWNLOAD/8.43/

[DJBlu]

Using mainly mkv containers, Cyberlink H.264/AVC Decoder 3319a however even when I have extracted the h264 stream and play that I still have the same results.

Using graphedit to play them at the moment as I want to use Media Portal.

[arfster]

Using mainly mkv containers, Cyberlink H.264/AVC Decoder 3319a however even when I have extracted the h264 stream and play that I still have the same results.


Ahh, then it's the same problem as everyone else: the Cyberlink decoder can't accelerate most x264-created stuff regardless of what container format it's in. Same thing happens with the Nvidia cards - there's no solution until Cyberlink fix things, or somebody else releases a compatible decoder.

[DJBlu]

Ahh, then it's the same problem as everyone else: the Cyberlink decoder can't accelerate most x264-created stuff regardless of what container format it's in. Same thing happens with the Nvidia cards - there's no solution until Cyberlink fix things, or somebody else releases a compatible decoder.

Thanks for that, strange it works for 720p stuff tho.

[Arnejo]

Good thread, i read this article yesterday from Toms Hardware, the refered to this forum for 2400pro problems :)
Read it xttp://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/26/avivo_hd_vs_purevideo/
Let's start with the 2400 PRO. This is one hell of an issue, as all of the 1920x1080 content was played back at a maximum resolution of somewhere around 1440 pixels wide. This means that if your desktop resolution is set to more than 1440 pixels wide, the 2400 PRO would display HD content in a box with a black border around it. Yuck!

We found a registry tweak hack on the 'net that would allow the 2400 to output video at the full 1920x1080 resolution (AVS Forum - Home Theater Computer), but it only seemed to work for us in Windows XP, and only if the 'pulldown detection' setting was disabled in the Catalyst drivers.

When we asked ATI about the problem, they let us know that they had intentionally limited the output size on slower cards like the 2400 PRO, because they were worried that HD video would choke on them. However, they also promised us that the upcoming 7.11 Catalyst drivers would remove this limitation, and allow even the lowly 2400 PRO to display 1920x1080 video. So we'll be checking up on their promise in a future review.

[arfster]

Good thread, i read this article yesterday from Toms Hardware, the refered to this forum for 2400pro problems :)
Read it xttp://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/26/avivo_hd_vs_purevideo/

Well I never, an article using HQV that doesn't make me want to bash my head off the wall.

I've also heard the same thing wrt the 1080p screenfill (it's actually 1600 pixels it fills, not 1440 btw), in that it's been fixed for next drivers. My bugreport on this to ATI (one of many) actually got marked resolved lately, the first time I've seen that happen :-)

Interesting they complemented ATI noise reduction (aka trdenoise). Have to say I'm getting gradually more impressed with it in recent drivers. Sometime soon I'll find the time for a good trial session on this....

I'd agree with their conclusion that the 2400 doesn't have the horsepower for HD noise reduction (although you can probably force it on, it's a massive hit on the shaders). However for the "jaggies" you need VA deinterlacing, and that is possible with the 2400pro (allbeit with mpeg2 you have to use software decoding + hardware deinterlacing). You still need to fiddle a bit, and it's really tight on memory bandwidth admittedly, so a 2600pro is probably still a better recommendation (and is barely more expensive).

[kevekev30]

Well I never, an article using HQV that doesn't make me want to bash my head off the wall.

I've also heard the same thing wrt the 1080p screenfill (it's actually 1600 pixels it fills, not 1440 btw), in that it's been fixed for next drivers. My bugreport on this to ATI (one of many) actually got marked resolved lately, the first time I've seen that happen :-)

Interesting they complemented ATI noise reduction (aka trdenoise). Have to say I'm getting gradually more impressed with it in recent drivers. Sometime soon I'll find the time for a good trial session on this....

I'd agree with their conclusion that the 2400 doesn't have the horsepower for HD noise reduction (although you can probably force it on, it's a massive hit on the shaders). However for the "jaggies" you need VA deinterlacing, and that is possible with the 2400pro (allbeit with mpeg2 you have to use software decoding + hardware deinterlacing). You still need to fiddle a bit, and it's really tight on memory bandwidth admittedly, so a 2600pro is probably still a better recommendation (and is barely more expensive).

arfster which driver combination tweaked and official will work at 1080p for a 2400xt card in windows vista 32 bit? thanks in advance.

[arfster]

arfster which driver combination tweaked and official will work at 1080p for a 2400xt card in windows vista 32 bit? thanks in advance.

Any of them should do, you just need to set the relevant tweak in my sig. The one you're looking for is VForceMaxResSize (aka SORTOverrideVidSizeCaps in Cat7.7 and earlier) - this needs to be 2.8 million or more for 1080p.

You could also try these drivers:
http://www.visiontek.com/teksupport/drivers/7.10n_Vista_driver.html

They're somewhere between 7.10 and 7.11, and may include the upcoming fix for the 2400 1080p screen size issue (they also fixed the 7.10 mpeg2 problem in these). If you or anyone test and find they do work, please post.

[Gaizka]

Hello

Can anybody playback wmv hd files with hardware acceleration?

i can only accelerate Mpeg2 files like Sony, Panasonic sample videos at 720p and 1080i but wmv and mov files push my cpu at 100% and low gpu usage :-(

My config:
Athlon XP 2000+ 1 GB ram
XP SP2
2400 pro AGP 8.43 drivers reg tweaked
WMP 11
Powerdvd 7.3

[kevekev30]

Any of them should do, you just need to set the relevant tweak in my sig. The one you're looking for is VForceMaxResSize (aka SORTOverrideVidSizeCaps in Cat7.7 and earlier) - this needs to be 2.8 million or more for 1080p.

You could also try these drivers:
http://www.visiontek.com/teksupport/drivers/7.10n_Vista_driver.html

They're somewhere between 7.10 and 7.11, and may include the upcoming fix for the 2400 1080p screen size issue (they also fixed the 7.10 mpeg2 problem in these). If you or anyone test and find they do work, please post.

These drivers work great, good hd-dvd playback, no tweaking at all Thanks arfster.

[Tsunami2000]

Thanks for the response, Fuz.

I plugged in a VGA cable to the second DVI output with an adapter and then into my Samsung tv... and the picture seems infinately better. Does that help point to any possible problems? I don't think it has to do with resources - I have a brand new quad core (Q6600) with 4 mb RAM (3 available) and 512 mb on the card. Also, all my problems are from first boot - I just installed the card yesterday. And there are no problems in device manager.

Thanks again.



Has the card ever worked for you, or did this happen upon first boot? If its the first time you've booted up, check the device manager and see if there is a yellow exclamation mark on the video adapter? If there is, no drivers are going to help you.

I have seen this happen a few times with different video cards on various setups. It is most probably a problem is resources, in particular IRQ issues.

Try freeing up some resources by disabling anything you don't need in the bios settings (ie serial and parallel ports). This some times works, otherwise, it could be one of a million problems.... In the past, it usually meant time for a new mobo.

Good luck.

Fuz.

[arfster]

These drivers work great, good hd-dvd playback, no tweaking at all Thanks arfster.

Cool, they filled 1080p for hddvd/bluray in PDVD?

Shock horror - did ATI actually fix a bug?

[hamish b]

These drivers work great, good hd-dvd playback, no tweaking at all Thanks arfster.

i agree

getting (finally) smooth playback at 48hz at 1080p without the little hiccups:D

i did a complete install after cleaning previous 7.10 drivers. still had to apply 280000 resize tweak though

card is 2600xt on vista 32

thanks too arfster

[kevekev30]

Cool, they filled 1080p for hddvd/bluray in PDVD?

Shock horror - did ATI actually fix a bug?

yes they did everything works as it is supposed to. funny i didnt have to do any reg editing with a 2400xt but the previous poster with a 2600xt did?

[arfster]

yes they did everything works as it is supposed to. funny i didnt have to do any reg editing with a 2400xt but the previous poster with a 2600xt did?

Could it perhaps be a registry hangover of vforceblahdeblah 2800000 from previous installs? Catalyst driver packages have a habit of doing that - unless you clean pretty thoroughly it'll retain settings.

[hamish b]

Could it perhaps be a registry hangover of vforceblahdeblah 2800000 from previous installs? Catalyst driver packages have a habit of doing that - unless you clean pretty thoroughly it'll retain settings.

thats what happened
i did an install over the top of 7.10 and the tweaks remained
its when i did a complete uninstall, reg clean and install that i had to redo some of the tweaks

[dastrong]

Hi all

I final have everything working with the 2400 pro bar one thing and that is blu ray mpeg2 hd.

An example is Casino Royale, the intro to the disk is in mpeg 2 HD and will not hardware accelerate in PDVD 7.3 with patch 2911. When it gets to the movie which is MPEG 4 AVC it is fine and uses about 23% of the processor (P4 3.0GHZ).

Has anyone got MPEG2 HD accelerating in blu ray on these cards. Any help would be gratefully received.

Thanks

Dave

[DJBlu]

Ahh, then it's the same problem as everyone else: the Cyberlink decoder can't accelerate most x264-created stuff regardless of what container format it's in. Same thing happens with the Nvidia cards - there's no solution until Cyberlink fix things, or somebody else releases a compatible decoder.

Just tried H264 and it works, just pissed now as everything I have is x264. I think I'll wait for Cyberlink to pull their fingers out their arses. Thanks for clearing that up for me tho as I was going mad with reinstalls.

[arfster]

I final have everything working with the 2400 pro bar one thing and that is blu ray mpeg2 hd.


That's been the case since the 2xxx cards were launched - the 2400 has never accelerated bluray mpeg2, the 2600 has.

Open a ticket with ATI, they're doing a burst of video fixes atm so it's the right time.

[Finken]

Hello....

When playing DVDs on my HTPC, it has occasional "hiccups", intervals of perhaps 5-10 minutes.

Picture quality is superb, compared to my old standalone DVD player, but these hiccups are bothering me.

I use PowerDVD, with HW acceleration enabled.

Watching GPU activity in CCC while playing DVD, it starts with approx 30-50% and slowly descends to 5-10%. When GPU activity is low, I get these hiccups for a few seconds, until GPU activity quickly rise to 30-50% again.
These GPU drops/rises will continue until movie ends.

CPU load is <10%, no applications running.
I have reinstalled (last) drivers and OS. Updated BIOS

What can be the problem here?
HW/SW??

My HTPC:
P4 641, 3,2 Ghz
Asrock 775 dual VSTA
2 Gb DDR RAM
ATI HD2600XT
WIN XP pro/sp2
PowerDVD 7.

Thanx FC

[sugatam]

I am using a HIS 2600XT on XP SP2, and cannot get wmv hd accelerated (the files either have VC1 in a wmv container, or old wm9 video, neither seems to be accelerated). From arfster's posts, it seems like this is at least supposed to work on the 2600? I see this with cat 7.7 and 7.9 (don't want to update to 7.10 since that break bluray mpeg2!)

Kudos to arfster for his continued research into making the radeon 2k series perform.

[originalsnuffy]

I downloaded some 7.10 drivers from Visiontek. Are we sure that these are in fact updated compared to 7.10 from ATI itself?

[arfster]

I downloaded some 7.10 drivers from Visiontek. Are we sure that these are in fact updated compared to 7.10 from ATI itself?

They're definitely different - the installer package is from 9th October rather than the 5th, and they're build 54061 rather than 53254. More importantly, they don't have the mpeg2 2600 bluray problem that the official 7.10s do.

[hamish b]

Hello....

When playing DVDs on my HTPC, it has occasional "hiccups", intervals of perhaps 5-10 minutes.

Picture quality is superb, compared to my old standalone DVD player, but these hiccups are bothering me.

I use PowerDVD, with HW acceleration enabled.

Watching GPU activity in CCC while playing DVD, it starts with approx 30-50% and slowly descends to 5-10%. When GPU activity is low, I get these hiccups for a few seconds, until GPU activity quickly rise to 30-50% again.
These GPU drops/rises will continue until movie ends.

CPU load is <10%, no applications running.
I have reinstalled (last) drivers and OS. Updated BIOS

What can be the problem here?
HW/SW??

My HTPC:
P4 641, 3,2 Ghz
Asrock 775 dual VSTA
2 Gb DDR RAM
ATI HD2600XT
WIN XP pro/sp2
PowerDVD 7.

Thanx FC

what dvd format are you using ? ntsc or pal?
my pal 50hz play nicely but it took me a while to get 48hz to play well for ntsc
the visontek dirvers (and soon to be 7.11) might fix your problem.

[TheFranchise]

I posted a few pages back about the 2400pro maxing out trying to do Bob on 1080i and thus having a stutter. That was with XP and 7.8 drivers tweaks from here, including re-turning off mpeg2 acceleration, and pretty much every decoder you can think of. Even tried Bitcontrol.

After a reformat, 7.10, and no reg tweaks from here, it can do Bob at around 85% gpu. I'm almost afraid to do any of the tweaks and mess with it. :) I also don't have PowerDVD installed yet which did cause a problem or two before even if I wasn't using it for a player or its decoder, such as getting what I'm guessing is double-deinterlacing, and thus massive stuttering, if the deinterlacing checkbox was checked.

Since I didn't add any of the tweaks from here, I don't think it's currently hardware accelerating mpeg2, but that doesn't matter. I'm still slowly messing with it but just wanted to say that my 2400pro is indeed doing Bob on 1080i mpeg2 OTA with XP. I don't know if the 7.10 drivers are the main reason or what.

Thing is, if I didn't add the tweaks and thus it's not hardware accelerating mpeg2 and thus not using deinterlacing on the card, and if I'm currently controlling the deinterlacing via the decoder, (Gabest MPV at the moment), the gpu is around 40% on MPV's Weave and 85% on MPV's Bob. So I'm getting software deinterlacing but the gpu is still accelerating mpeg2? Whatever is going on, it's working a lot better than it did.

[arfster]

After a reformat, 7.10, and no reg tweaks from here, it can do Bob at around 85% gpu.

What's probably happening is that by not applying the dxva_nohddecode 0 tweak, you leave it in its default state: no mpeg2 acceleration for the 2400. If you're playing interlaced content, this is usually the best thing, because deinterlacing+scaling will eat most of the GPU. By itself mpeg2 acceleration will eat about 50%, so you're left with no overhead to scale and deinterlace with. This is why ATI disable 2400 mpeg2 acceleration.

Since your GPU% changed when you moved weave>bob, you must be doing hardware deinterlacing - this is actually possible without acceleration, although I'd only seen it in PDVD or using bitcontrol/ffdshow as the decoder. However, are you sure you're bobbing and not vector-adaptive deinterlacing? (what setting is CCC basic vid quality on?). 85% seems awfully high without acceleration.

[indieke2]

I Installed the changed drivers about two weeks ago. Everything working fine on my 2600 XT Sapphire.

But.......I bought "The Invisible" on BD. Now it says that my drivers are not HDCP!

I installed the latest Powerdvd 3319 a, but that doesn't solve a thing.

Now could b that PWDVD, is not doing his job right? Other titles play, or should I again change drivers? Looks weird, because everything else is working.

I read that I am not the only one concerned, as a lot of people, who bought BD's this month, have the same issue!
What is weird, that this title would not be BD +.....

[pochoboy]

indieke2,

what driver change did you do 2 weeks ago? Well, better yet for me asking,

what CCC are you using and what driver change did you do 2 weeks ago?

is your OS Vista64? what powerdvd version to run?

this is so complicated trying to get everything working

[pochoboy]

arfster,
I'm running a Sapphire 2600xt, vista64, CCC 7.10(I could change this per your recomendation).

Whats your recomendations of CCC/powerdvd/driver fixes should I do(what version, what tweaks to use)? there's too many pages here to go thru. Idieke2 sounds like he's got something going here.

[arfster]

arfster,
I'm running a Sapphire 2600xt, vista64, CCC 7.10(I could change this per your recomendation).

Whats your recomendations of CCC/powerdvd/driver fixes should I do(what version, what tweaks to use)? there's too many pages here to go thru. Idieke2 sounds like he's got something going here.

Sorry, I've no idea what does and doesn't work with Vista64. Is there a specific problem, acceleration not working? In Vista32 the 2600 isn't too troublesome.

[pochoboy]

Sorry, I've no idea what does and doesn't work with Vista64. Is there a specific problem, acceleration not working? In Vista32 the 2600 isn't too troublesome.

there's no problem as of yet, I just wanted a starting point of some sort to begin with. I just noticed your "tweak guide" at the bottom of your post, I'll use that with 7.9's? or is 7.10 okay to use?

when I first installed Vista64 I was having problems playing .avi files with media player 11 and tried a certain multi codec pack. Got it working but was worried if these new codecs would affect the 2600xt hardware acceleration playback. I had a bad time when uninstalling these codecs as it screwed mp11 playback as not having codecs. So, I did a complete reinstall of VISTA64, there's no OEM Vista64 codec to be had to reinstall, even from MS themselves.

So my situation now is that I'm alittle hesistant in installing codec packs. but would give PowerDVD a try.

so any starting point you'd suggest I'd be giving it a try

[indieke2]

indieke2,

what driver change did you do 2 weeks ago? Well, better yet for me asking,

what CCC are you using and what driver change did you do 2 weeks ago?

is your OS Vista64? what powerdvd version to run?

this is so complicated trying to get everything working

I have Ex'Deus:ATI HD2x00 Registry Tweaks 0.9

For Powerdvd, I installed the latest version, 3319 a.

On that version, it once said i have to connect with the Cyberlink site for an update....again! But as I protect my HC computer, and have no internet connection on it, I couldn't do this on the moment. It never asked me again, but kept saying my computerdriver was not HCPC.

[karrih]

On that version, it once said i have to connect with the Cyberlink site for an update....again! But as I protect my HC computer, and have no internet connection on it, I couldn't do this on the moment. It never asked me again, but kept saying my computerdriver was not HCPC.

I get this driver not HDCP message in some situations as well, I believe for example when I am running my projector as an extended display. I have two projectors which should be HDCP compatible, but I can only get one accepted by cyberlink bluray advisor...

[indieke2]

Only got one running here! No there is something else wrong....

[indyjonesuk]

Hi all

My first post here and I am after some help please!

Just build a new htpc based on a Zalman hd160XT case, with vista media centre.

The problem I am having is with a bad red-shift, especially visible on flesh tones. The card I am using is a Sapphire HD2600XT Ultimate, with catalyst 7.10 drives connected to a CRT tv via s-vhs.
I have tried the tweaks posted on here, and tried disabling the flesh tones function in the drivers but it does not seem to help at all.
The same problem happens both from TV and from DVD sources.

Cheers

IJ

[rashid11]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/26/avivo_hd_vs_purevideo/index.html

[originalsnuffy]

The Tom's review did not look good for the 2400. The 2600 did fine.

[karrih]

The Tom's review did not look good for the 2400. The 2600 did fine.

As a 2400 owner I'm left wondering the specific area of deinterlacing the HQV test actually measures. I'm under the impression that I get 1080i h264 and mpeg deinterlaced when I set VA in CCC because if I set weave, there will be obvious combing artefacts. VA is supposed to help with jaggies too, right? I guess the noise reduction is not there for 2400, but then many seem to prefer not using it with 2600 either.

Oh well, if ATI manages to fix the posterisation issue, I guess I'll upgrade to 2600 anyway.

[Finken]

Hamish b
what dvd format are you using ? ntsc or pal?
my pal 50hz play nicely but it took me a while to get 48hz to play well for ntsc
the visontek dirvers (and soon to be 7.11) might fix your problem.

I use PAL DVDs. Resolution to my Sony LCD TV is set to 1280X720, 50hz.

Hamish b
the visontek dirvers (and soon to be 7.11) might fix your problem.
What is it with visiontek drivers? Is it a modded 7.10 driver?

Could my problems with varying GPU activity/ stutter be HW related?
Picture is crisp and clear, no artifacts.

[arfster]

What is it with visiontek drivers? Is it a modded 7.10 driver?


Sort of. ATI constantly update their drivers, they just only release them every month. However the third party manufacturers get builds more often than that, and some will release based on those.

[balazer]

I think they're mostly accurate in this case, as all those features are there (other than 2:2 which doesn't really work, and that mpeg2 needs a reg change). The real problem is that mpeg2 isn't accelerated in the UVD but in the stream processors, as the speclist would suggest - I'd hoped this was a bug, but it seems not. As a result this means that mpeg2 HD on the 2400pro eats half of the card's GPU (h264/vc1 use nothing), leaving not enough power left to do even halfdecent deinterlacing with mpeg2. Thus we have to switch off hardware acceleration while retaining hw deinterlacing control - possible, but other problems are then created.

If there was going to be a quibble, it's over the inclusion of vector-adaptive deinterlacing. This isn't possible in XP at all because of VMR9 overheads, regardless of whether you switch off absolutely everything else, and regardless of format. You need to move up to Vista (even buggier drivers), or to a 2400xt. The latter has oodles more power, but seems to be very dodgy with the passive heatsinks, which is what a lot of us are liking about the 2400pro :-)Does anyone know the current state of MPEG-2 playback with a 2400 XT? In particular, I want something with decode acceleration, best possible de-interlacing, best possible inverse telecine, and proper PC & TV levels for both types of displays. h.264 would be nice too, but MPEG-2 is my priority.

I want to buy a new laptop, and I'm looking at the Gateway M-150XL. I'd appreciate suggestions for other laptops as well! (ATI or Nvidia)

[02fx4dude]

Hi All,
I'm planning to replace my current workhorse computer and I'm thinking of semi-retiring it to use as an HTPC. Since it doesn't have PCIe, I'm thinking of putting in a 2600xt AGP card, and a blu ray drive.

So the question is, HDCP issues aside, how well is the 2600xt AGP card working for blu ray playback? I've read some posts on this thread that the AGP cards don't seem to accelerate all blu ray encoding formats.

Edit: Oh yeah, I'm planning to use Windows XP and PowerDVD Ultra.

Thanks

Brian

[Finken]

Sort of. ATI constantly update their drivers, they just only release them every month. However the third party manufacturers get builds more often than that, and some will release based on those.

Ok thanks for fast reply....what is new with this drivers then? (In short version:))

Can I use them (=visiontek) with my HIS card?

FC:D

[BigTony]

Well, this is not entirely true, XP SP2, ccc 7.10 with reg treak, component connection to hdtv, sound card 5.1 analog connection to receiver, Visiontek 2400pro AGP, I am using powerdvd ultra 7.3.2605 PORTABLE VERSION for blu-ray mpeg2 playing, and powerdvd ultra 7.3.3319 for format other than mpeg2 playing. So Hardware acceleration works for ALL hd-dvd and blu-ray playing.

If you only wants mpeg2 playing, please use 2605 for it.

Note: the PORTABLE VERSION is generated using thinstall (www.thinstall.com), this kind of version doesn't make change to system, only running in a kind of virtual environment, so you can run different version of the software in the same machine). Please don't ask me for portable version software or how-to, you need legally own the software and you can find instruction online very easily.

BigTony

That's been the case since the 2xxx cards were launched - the 2400 has never accelerated bluray mpeg2, the 2600 has.

Open a ticket with ATI, they're doing a burst of video fixes atm so it's the right time.

[topcaser]

Hi,

three questions:
- are all the registry tweaks from Exdeus also valid for the new 7.10 CCC?
- i have copied all tweaks in a textfile and renamed it to a .reg file as suggested by exdeus. What types are these registry tweaks - strings or dec? Have not found any informaion about it. Using XP
- Does these settings also affect HD playback - e.g. trdenoise HD noise reductiion?

[xb1az3x]

A quick question for 2600 card owners. When using one of these cards for an HTPC will I notice a difference between a HD2600XT and HD2600PRO? Between 256 and 512?

I am not talking about any gaming at all, only decoding video and quality of output to the screen.

Thanks

[arfster]

- are all the registry tweaks from Exdeus also valid for the new 7.10 CCC?


Yup. Although use the Visiontek 7.10s, they're less buggy.


- i have copied all tweaks in a textfile and renamed it to a .reg file as suggested by exdeus. What types are these registry tweaks - strings or dec? Have not found any informaion about it. Using XP
- Does these settings also affect HD playback - e.g. trdenoise HD noise reductiion?

Check my sig for answers! Trdenoise only affects interlaced though, and only with motion/vector adaptive deinterlacing on.

[penngray]

I have the HD2600pro and its connected to my 42" Westy 1080p using HDMI.


Im playing King Kong to test HD movies, why can I not get a full screen with the movie. I always have black borders around the movie. Does it stretch the screen at all?

[ExDeus]

installed Saphire ATI Radeon 2600HD Pro 512MB AGP. when I want to install either the new drive or the complete Catlyst package it gives me this error:

Severe: Setup did not find a driver compatible with your hardware or operating system.Setup will not exit.

The files I'm trying to install are: 7-10_xp32_dd_53250 for the driver
and 7-10_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_53250 for the complete package including driver and new Catalyst.

Card is now on the driver that came with the disk in the original package.
Any ideas or suggestions?
Thanks
Didn't see your question answered directly.

You need to use drivers from Sapphire made for the AGP version of your card, or you can make some adjustments to the latest ATI drivers as detailed on my site (http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/ati-hd2x00/#AGP).

[ExDeus]

Thanks for that, strange it works for 720p stuff tho.
As the problems relate to the x264 encoder and the Cyberlink decoder, it depends on which x264 options are enabled at the time of encoding.

Depending on the files you have, some 720p files may work, while others may not. The same goes with 1080p files, but as they are targeted for higher quality to begin with, I would say it's more likely the more complex encoding options get enabled which break DXVA with the Cyberlink decoder.

[ExDeus]

I downloaded some 7.10 drivers from Visiontek. Are we sure that these are in fact updated compared to 7.10 from ATI itself?

They're definitely different - the installer package is from 9th October rather than the 5th, and they're build 54061 rather than 53254. More importantly, they don't have the mpeg2 2600 bluray problem that the official 7.10s do.
arfster, those build numbers are for Vista. The build for XP is even higher --- ATI 7.10 is build 53250, VisionTek 8.43 is build 54566. Hopefully that means more fixes/enhancements were included in the XP build.

Curiously the VT site says the 8.43 drivers are b/w ATI 7.8 and 7.9, which is a statement that obviously wasn't updated since the last driver release that was b/w 7.8 & 7.9. Build 54566 would have to be b/w ATI 7.10 and 7.11.

[ExDeus]

Hi all

My first post here and I am after some help please!

Just build a new htpc based on a Zalman hd160XT case, with vista media centre.

The problem I am having is with a bad red-shift, especially visible on flesh tones. The card I am using is a Sapphire HD2600XT Ultimate, with catalyst 7.10 drives connected to a CRT tv via s-vhs.
I have tried the tweaks posted on here, and tried disabling the flesh tones function in the drivers but it does not seem to help at all.
The same problem happens both from TV and from DVD sources.

Cheers

IJ
When you say you tried the tweaks posted here, does that include disabling pulldown detection in the CCC? That fixed the red-shift issue for me.

[Rew452]

You may find this useful, I posted this over rage3d;

Here are the modifications and their file names:

Please read carefully and make backup copies of all the files before you modify them. Name them something like *CA_53101_old.ini* for example.

This is only an example using Cat 7.10.RC4 WinXP set if you use them copy /paste should work fine otherwise follow suite and change names accordingly.

These first three files are in the *Driver* directory of Cat driver set In this example I used the Cat 7.10.RC4 WinXP.

These first three the CA_XXXXX.XXX - look for [WINXP64] / or the CX_XXXXX.XXX - look for [WINXP] and the INSTALL.ini modify both. the [WINXP64] and [WINXP]

Add the bold set of numbers *0x9587* to end of the first R6 line after Label=

CA_53101.ini
R6=DriverPath_R6,0x554F:0x149218BC,0x7162:0x3001147B,0x4173: 0x30011043,0x4E71,0x712A,0x7163,0x4153:0 x3000174B,0x7142:0x30001787,0x5569:0x15481787,0x4173:0x30011 462,0x71A3:0x300117EE,0x4153:0x30001092, 0x5B63:0x30001092,*0x9587*

CX_53101.ini
R6=DriverPath_R6,0x554F:0x149218BC,0x7162:0x3001147B,0x4173: 0x30011043,0x4E71,0x712A,0x7163,0x4153:0 x3000174B,0x7142:0x30001787,0x5569:0x15481787,0x4173:0x30011 462,0x71A3:0x300117EE,0x4153:0x30001092, 0x5B63:0x30001092,*0x9587*

INSTALL.ini
R6=DriverPath_R6,0x554F:0x149218BC,0x7162:0x3001147B,0x4173: 0x30011043,0x4E71,0x712A,0x7163,0x4153:0 x3000174B,0x7142:0x30001787,0x5569:0x15481787,0x4173:0x30011 462,0x71A3:0x300117EE,0x4153:0x30001092, 0x5B63:0x30001092,*0x9587*

Under the *Driver* directory is the XP_INF dir. in this one you modify:

CX_53101.inf

First search for HD 2600; that will get you to the area to add the following

"ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro AGP" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9587

The one for HD 2400 Pro AGP is already there.

Try it and see if it works for you have question post and I will try and clarify

Hope this helps.
Rew

Good luck

[ExDeus]

- are all the registry tweaks from Exdeus also valid for the new 7.10 CCC?
As arfster mentioned, yes they still all apply. In addition, with the 2600, you also need to add the DXVA_NOHDDECODE tweak with ATI Cat 7.10.

I updated my program to ATI HD2x00 Registry Tweaks 0.10 (http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/ati-hd2x00/) to add the DXVA_NOHDDECODE tweak for the HD2600.

- i have copied all tweaks in a textfile and renamed it to a .reg file as suggested by exdeus. What types are these registry tweaks - strings or dec? Have not found any informaion about it. Using XP
I would say it's much easier to run my program now that I developed it, but if you'd prefer to stick with the .reg file, then the settings as I posted them (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=11622510&postcount=2011) are strings (REG_SZ). You can see that from the double-quotes around the values. Other types, like DWORD, are entered with dword:0 instead of "0".

[ExDeus]

I have the HD2600pro and its connected to my 42" Westy 1080p using HDMI.


Im playing King Kong to test HD movies, why can I not get a full screen with the movie. I always have black borders around the movie. Does it stretch the screen at all?
Unless you're justing seeing letterboxing, you likely need the "SORTOverrideVidSizeCaps"="2800000" / "VForceMaxResSize"="2800000" registry tweak.

See arfster's explanation (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=11659897&postcount=2121).

Download ATI HD2x00 Registry Tweaks (http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/ati-hd2x00/) to fix it.

[ExDeus]

A quick question for 2600 card owners. When using one of these cards for an HTPC will I notice a difference between a HD2600XT and HD2600PRO? Between 256 and 512?

I am not talking about any gaming at all, only decoding video and quality of output to the screen.

Thanks
I doubt that you'd see any difference at all for video decoding or quality.

With my HD2600Pro AGP, I've been able to accelerate up to 1080p MPEG2, AVC & VC-1, and deinterlace, vector adaptive, up to 1080i MPEG2. The 2600pro has enough guts to get thru anything I've thrown at it.

The 2600XT has more horsepower if the cost differential is minimal for the cards you're looking at, but I haven't seen a need for it.

For video quality, the 2600Pro and 2600XT both use the same processors, so video quality is generally identical. The XT is simply cranked up. 2600Pro: 600MHz GPU, 400/800MHz RAM. 2600XT: 800MHz GPU, 700/1400MHz RAM.

As for qty of RAM, it's not as though a bunch of textures are being loaded into memory as with games. I don't think any video decoding will come close to using 256MB, so you shouldn't see a difference there. I suppose, theoretically in the future, running Vista or other programs with super-duper Aero features could eat up a lot of graphics RAM for 3D processing, starving your card for video decoding.

[pochoboy]

ExDeus, I've used your Registry Tweak 0.10, i've found 2 standard vga devices and selected 2400 "no" for the 2600 on both devices. I've selected the "yes" to select all registry tweaks(did so manually also) on both devices. The problem that I have, if it is a problem is that after the change in tweaks a display box states:

The following are the current settings(blank values indicate no settings), below this statement it list the registry tweaks and all of them are "= (blank)", the only registry tweak that has a value is: DXVA_WMV_NA = 1 ; again all other tweaks have no value

is this correct?

OS = Vista64
CCC = 7.10 visiontek
2600xt sapphire PCIX

[pochoboy]

on another note, I went into CCC found the 2D registry path and GUID number, then ran "regedit" followed the CCC path for the 2D listings but there was no corresponding GUID in the video folder.


hmmmm, somethings screwy here, any ideas what I'm doing wrong out here?


EDIT: Ai Sous, I getting old, I found the path, LOL, I was following your path in your guide. Its a different path in CCC

I'll go on further in the tweaks

Sorry bout that

[bialio]

Hi all,

I built a few HTPC's about 6 months ago - right around the time the 24/2600HD series was hitting the market. I followed this thread then when it was young - back when it only had about 10 pages :D

Is there a consensus on what the best 2x00 series card is for HD DVD / BD viewing? I am going to upgrade an HTPC and would like a silent (fanless) card for it that will fit in the NSK2400 case - so it needs to be normal height (no crazy tall heat sinks!)

Any suggestions / recommendations for the ATI line? I'd like to stay in the $150 range.

Also, are there any outstanding bugs still with these things? Or have recent releases of CCC ironed out most of the issues? I remember there was a color space issue at HD resolutions....

btl.

[TheFranchise]

What's probably happening is that by not applying the dxva_nohddecode 0 tweak, you leave it in its default state: no mpeg2 acceleration for the 2400. If you're playing interlaced content, this is usually the best thing, because deinterlacing+scaling will eat most of the GPU. By itself mpeg2 acceleration will eat about 50%, so you're left with no overhead to scale and deinterlace with. This is why ATI disable 2400 mpeg2 acceleration.

Since your GPU% changed when you moved weave>bob, you must be doing hardware deinterlacing - this is actually possible without acceleration, although I'd only seen it in PDVD or using bitcontrol/ffdshow as the decoder. However, are you sure you're bobbing and not vector-adaptive deinterlacing? (what setting is CCC basic vid quality on?). 85% seems awfully high without acceleration.

Yep, I figure I'm not getting mpeg acceleration, which I didn't want anyway and did turn off again after installing all the tweaks on the previous install, but Weave had the gpu around 50% and then Bob (hardware or software enabled) had it 95-100% and it would jitter the picture a bit when it maxed out. I thought maybe something weird happened on that install where even changing the mpeg2 acceleration tweak back somehow still didn't turn off mpeg2 acceleration.

On this fresh reformat and reinstall... I've only had it running a few days and have been too busy to mess with it much, but trying to open the Catalyst Suite brings up an error that says "Could not load file assembly 'CLI.Implementation, Versions=2.0' blah blah blah or one of its dependencies. System cannot find the file."

So on a fresh install I installed the full Catalyst Suite but have never opened it so haven't messed with any of it. Maybe the error is causing higher than normal gpu usage. Wouldn't think so since it's still lower than before no matter what I did, but who knows. So, so far I have only changed the deinterlacing via software decoder (Gabest MPV) on this install.

On the previous install, it was rare (maybe one out of five decoders) that I could even change the deinterlacing via the card; usually only software decoder changes would change the deinterlacing. I just tried Cyberlink DTV decoder and nothing changed when changing its deinterlacing via the decoder. I think that was one of the few decoders that let changes via the video card actually do anything. Can't fully test it now since I can't open Catalyst.

The only thing currently installed is CCCP pack, and ATI Avivo to get the ATI mux that I currently don't use anyway. Well, and VLC which of course I'm not using in any of these tests. No reg tweaks from here have been used.

And here I thought I was doing well doing 80-85% on Bob since earlier in the thread it was said the 2400pro doesn't have enough power, and maybe not even has the settings from ATI, to do more than Bob 1080i. When the previous install couldn't even do Bob without maxing the gpu, I was getting ready to throw the card away. I tried every decoder and setting I could think of to take stress off the card and put it on the cpu, but it maxed out on anything other than Weave.

Weird, eh? I will work on getting the Catalyst suite to work now.

[topcaser]

I would say it's much easier to run my program now that I developed it, but if you'd prefer to stick with the .reg file, then the settings as I posted them (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=11622510&postcount=2011) are strings (REG_SZ). You can see that from the double-quotes around the values. Other types, like DWORD, are entered with dword:0 instead of "0".
Hi Exdeus,

could't find any dword registry hack after a rough walk through of all hacks. It is all DWORD, isnt it?

[Andy o]

Hi, guys, coming back for some info.

Are you still having level expansion issues with the ATI cards? Cause nVidia seems to have applied levels expansion for HD (I tested HD-DVDs), but not for SD, in their latest beta drivers, 169.04. I updated from the 163.71 beta, which applied no expansion, as any other nVidia drivers that I can remember.

Using Vista x86 here, with a 8600GTS, that otherwise still is working fine for me. I wonder if this expansion thing is gonna be a trend from now on.

[TheFranchise]

I will work on getting the Catalyst suite to work now.

A Catalyst uninstall and a reinstall later, and I now notice why this time wasn't maxing out the gpu. I was only running the monitor at 1280x1024 instead of the usual 1600x1200. I can switch between the two resolutions and go from 85% or so to pegging the gpu at 99.9% and getting a jitter every second.

Having the basic CCC to the left to "performance" doesn't help. Changing the deinterlacing in Advanced doesn't affect the GPU. Maybe I need a 2400xt or 2600pro after all.

[karrih]

I was only running the monitor at 1280x1024 instead of the usual 1600x1200. I can switch between the two resolutions and go from 85% or so to pegging the gpu at 99.9% and getting a jitter every second.


So scaling is the proverbial straw. I wonder how 1920x1080 resolution display behaves. Personally I have been running 720p display pretty succesfully using 2400 card. By the way, as far as I know I don't use VMR9, even though I have XP.

[indyjonesuk]

When you say you tried the tweaks posted here, does that include disabling pulldown detection in the CCC? That fixed the red-shift issue for me.

Nope not tried that :D will look forward to giving it a go!

Many Thanks

[h8redv2]

Hi
I´m in 50 Hz land, and getting DVB-C into vista. Using 2600xt, and every single tweak around here.
How about that posterization ?
I can only get the red color clipping and posterization to go away if I choose adaptive deinterlacing (which sucks)
Anyone know what else can be done ?
I am currently using the Avivo decoder for mpeg2.
I also have powerdvd 7.3 ultra installed, but somehow I can not grasp how to configure it for best deinterlacing. Does it use the settings in CCC or what, I can see "hardware deinterlacing" on it´s menus, but how to use the settings ?
I would like to use Vector adaptive deinterlacing, but not with red color clipping af posterization.
Or should I just wait for a proper driver ?

[RichB]

I received 3319 directly from PowerDVD last week so I could play Fantastic Four RSS (not worth the trouble ;).

Now, the screen is solid green after my computer sleeps. I need to reboot to play anything. Also, the image now pauses and stutters occasionally even though the CPU utilization is low with my 2600Pro. I hat ve submitted a ticked.

I tried going back to a restore point and PowerDVD did not work. I had to re-install from my last new version 2219 and then upgrade. Since there is really not much difference in size, why don't they just give us a full version? Considering their quality level, it would be the least they can do.

I guess we know why this has not been made an official update.

- Rich

[cyborgofaltron]

So I hope someone will know how to answer this ? in this form, didn't really see where else I could put it. Anyway, I have a HD2600XT 512 APG, I installed the new video drivers everything worked fine, then I went to install the HDMI audio driver or possibly the WDM driver and now I get this bs error when I try to load Halo 1 for PC saying: A debugger has been detected (in the title bar) (then in the main portion of the prompt) Unload the debugger and try again. Where is this darned debugger, cuase that would be the only thing that I could think of, I've tried the Microsoft help pages and they didnt matter for me, I dont have a creative sound card and I already did the reboot as listed, and my drivers are up to date.

[karrih]

Is there a consensus on what the best 2x00 series card is for HD DVD / BD viewing? I am going to upgrade an HTPC and would like a silent (fanless) card for it that will fit in the NSK2400 case - so it needs to be normal height (no crazy tall heat sinks!)

Also, are there any outstanding bugs still with these things? Or have recent releases of CCC ironed out most of the issues? I remember there was a color space issue at HD resolutions....

btl.

I believe 2600Pro is often mentioned here when talking about price/performance. My initial screening would suggest that Gigabyte's 2600Pro and possibly Club3D's 2600Pro could fit in NSK2400. I would like to hear from someone who has these.

I dont think there is shortage of bugs, but nevertheless I'm using my 2400Pro card on a daily basis.

[xb1az3x]

I doubt that you'd see any difference at all for video decoding or quality.

With my HD2600Pro AGP, I've been able to accelerate up to 1080p MPEG2, AVC & VC-1, and deinterlace, vector adaptive, up to 1080i MPEG2. The 2600pro has enough guts to get thru anything I've thrown at it.

The 2600XT has more horsepower if the cost differential is minimal for the cards you're looking at, but I haven't seen a need for it.

For video quality, the 2600Pro and 2600XT both use the same processors, so video quality is generally identical. The XT is simply cranked up. 2600Pro: 600MHz GPU, 400/800MHz RAM. 2600XT: 800MHz GPU, 700/1400MHz RAM.

As for qty of RAM, it's not as though a bunch of textures are being loaded into memory as with games. I don't think any video decoding will come close to using 256MB, so you shouldn't see a difference there. I suppose, theoretically in the future, running Vista or other programs with super-duper Aero features could eat up a lot of graphics RAM for 3D processing, starving your card for video decoding.

Exactly the answer for which I was looking. Thank you!

[ExDeus]

ExDeus, I've used your Registry Tweak 0.10, i've found 2 standard vga devices and selected 2400 "no" for the 2600 on both devices. I've selected the "yes" to select all registry tweaks(did so manually also) on both devices. The problem that I have, if it is a problem is that after the change in tweaks a display box states:

The following are the current settings(blank values indicate no settings), below this statement it list the registry tweaks and all of them are "= (blank)", the only registry tweak that has a value is: DXVA_WMV_NA = 1 ; again all other tweaks have no value

is this correct?

OS = Vista64
CCC = 7.10 visiontek
2600xt sapphire PCIX

The program writes to the registry and then immediately reads it back from the same location, so if those values in the message box are blank, there is likely a permissions issue. I ran into some permission issues related to User Account Control in Vista and thought I had resolved them.

Is UAC turned off or at least set to prompt for access?

Also, when it gives you the Device Description for your device, does the note say "Note: The... registry key is present. This is likely the correct device." or "Note: The... registry key is not accessible. This is likely not the correct device."?

I will work on this code some more and try to make it more robust.

on another note, I went into CCC found the 2D registry path and GUID number, then ran "regedit" followed the CCC path for the 2D listings but there was no corresponding GUID in the video folder.


hmmmm, somethings screwy here, any ideas what I'm doing wrong out here?


EDIT: Ai Sous, I getting old, I found the path, LOL, I was following your path in your guide. Its a different path in CCC

I'll go on further in the tweaks

Sorry bout that
Vista has a few oddities related to the 2D Driver Path listed in the CCC. So, first you have to understand a couple things about the Windows registry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet is the key for the hardware profile/configuration that is currently in use, but it is really just a pointer to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001, or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002, or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003, etc., where the settings are really stored. So, when you open regedit and view HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet, you are actually viewing the values that are identical to one of the ControlSet00x keys.

In XP, the CCC always seems to report the CurrentControlSet key, but in Vista, it seems sometimes it is the ControlSet00x key.

There are also settings stored under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4 D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}, but I've found the settings reliably take effect when they are set in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video.

The easiest way to check that my program is putting the settings in the right key, is to run the program, and copy down the registry key when it finds what looks like the correct description. Go to that key, and review the settings. Look at, perhaps, the 3to2Pulldown key. Then go into the CCC, change the pulldown detection setting, and see if the 3to2Pulldown key changes --- after hitting F5 or going to View menu > Refresh.

[ExDeus]

Hi Exdeus,

could't find any dword registry hack after a rough walk through of all hacks. It is all DWORD, isnt it?
Negative. As I mentioned, they are all strings. It was determined some time ago that the string values work. They are ready to use just as I posted them (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=11622510&postcount=2011).

[pochoboy]

ExDeus,

great explanation, I'll take a stab at it when I got more time.

[pochoboy]

ExDeus,

UAC was turned off as your program would not let me go any further as to changing the registry. I chose the "no" option to let me choose which registry options your program offered to change manually. There were no errors reported after each changed option choosen.

just wanted to give more info on what happened on my 2600xt Vista64 pc.

[pochoboy]

ExDeus,

okay I followed your programs path GUID and used regedit to located that GUID, apparently the values of registry changes made using your program being blank is that there's none of those registry items listed in that particular GUID.

Vista 64
2600xt pcie
ati 7.10

[ExDeus]

ExDeus,

okay I followed your programs path GUID and used regedit to located that GUID, apparently the values of registry changes made using your program being blank is that there's none of those registry items listed in that particular GUID.

Vista 64
2600xt pcie
ati 7.10
Thanks for letting me know. I fixed a bug in the way it was displaying the final "Done" dialog. The only thing limiting the display now is the max number of characters in a message box.

I've released a new version, ATI HD2x00 Registry Tweaks 0.11 (http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/ati-hd2x00/), with the following fixes (http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/ati-hd2x00/#changelog):

2007-10-31 0.11:
Added support for all video device numbers, not just "0000" and "0001".
Fixed final "Done" dialog to work properly under Vista.
Updated final "Done" dialog to display settings for all device numbers.
Added check for registry permissions each time a value is set.


Try the new version and let me know how it works.

[pochoboy]

Thanks for letting me know. I fixed a bug in the way it was displaying the final "Done" dialog. The only thing limiting the display now is the max number of characters in a message box.

I've released a new version, ATI HD2x00 Registry Tweaks 0.11 (http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/ati-hd2x00/), with the following fixes (http://exdeus.home.comcast.net/ati-hd2x00/#changelog):

2007-10-31 0.11:
Added support for all video device numbers, not just "0000" and "0001".
Fixed final "Done" dialog to work properly under Vista.
Updated final "Done" dialog to display settings for all device numbers.
Added check for registry permissions each time a value is set.


Try the new version and let me know how it works.

ExDeus,

It worked! Excellent stuff

[arfster]

8.43 betas (aka Cat7.11) available here, at least for Vista:

http://www.gecube.com/software-driver.php

ReleaseVersion,,"8.43-071011a-054434E-ATI" = the newest public build

AGP cards have a different set of drivers again. These support:

"ATI Radeon HD 2350" = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C7
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO" = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C3
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO " = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C4
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 Series" = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94CC
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT" = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C1
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT " = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C6
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9589
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO " = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9587
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 X2 Series" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_958A
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9588
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT " = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9586
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 GT" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9405
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 PRO" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9403
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 Series" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9401
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 Series " = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9402
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9400
"ATI Radeon HD 3870" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9501
"ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series " = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9507
"ATI Radeon HD 3850" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9505
"ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series " = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9500


Some interesting ones on the end there - high-end gaming cards with UVD perhaps?

[ProgGoblin]

Hi all

I opened a thread yesterday concerning a "problem" I had using my graphic card with my HDTV. olyar15 explained to me that the "problem" is that my HDTV overscan the image. so my question is if this line of HD cards have a solution for thin overscan phenomenon.

thanks :)

[mike infinity]

I'm not sure what 'thin' overscan means, but overscan can be corrected in Catalyst Control Center (CCC) under the HDTV dialog (you add a resolution and then adjust it to crop out the overscanned part of the image being displayed).

It can also be corrected in Powerstrip by adjusting the clocks in the advanced timings section. This can be a bit tricky though...and I get juddery output on movies when I use this option on my 2600xt (I use the CCC method instead).

[ProgGoblin]

"thin" supposed to be "this", sorry :)
mmm... will it work with any display and will I be able to play games on that costum resolution?
(I sure the answer is "no" but Im still crossing my fingers lol P:

[mike infinity]

Yes it should work on any display. Just set the output to the native resolution of the HDTV (mine is 1280x720p), then use CCC to crop it down a little to a custom resolution that fits the screen.

The games I have tried (which are very few since I use it primarily for TV/movie output) allowed me to select the custom resolution for output and it worked perfectly.

[ProgGoblin]

Thanks!
You've been allot of help.
As I currently use a nVidia card, do you happen to know if there is a similar overacan correction in ForceWare?

[dziendobry]

Hey guys
I've just installed "powercolor radeon hd 2400 pro agp" (had lot of driver issues with it:p ) .
Now i'm trying to get tv-out to work on my tv so i can surf internet on monitor and watch movies on tv at the same time.
Could somebody help me how to do this because i've tried to do this and still no luck :s . Previously i used nvidia card and there was little app called "TvTool" but it doesn't support ATI :(
I use Catalyst 7.10 and the only thing i managed to do is to switch from monitor
to TV (monitor turned off) and the color was black-white even if i set my tv to run in PAL/NTSC.
Looking forward for any help.

[DJBlu]

8.43 betas (aka Cat7.11) available here, at least for Vista:

http://www.gecube.com/software-driver.php

ReleaseVersion,,"8.43-071011a-054434E-ATI" = the newest public build

AGP cards have a different set of drivers again. These support:

"ATI Radeon HD 2350" = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C7
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO" = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C3
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO " = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C4
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 Series" = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94CC
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT" = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C1
"ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT " = ati2mtag_RV610, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_94C6
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9589
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO " = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9587
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 X2 Series" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_958A
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9588
"ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT " = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9586
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 GT" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9405
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 PRO" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9403
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 Series" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9401
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 Series " = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9402
"ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9400
"ATI Radeon HD 3870" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9501
"ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series " = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9507
"ATI Radeon HD 3850" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9505
"ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series " = ati2mtag_RV630, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9500


Some interesting ones on the end there - high-end gaming cards with UVD perhaps?

according to this there is

http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20071001PD211.html

You think they have learn't from their mistake of not including it in the 2900?

[DPlettner]

Yes it should work on any display. Just set the output to the native resolution of the HDTV (mine is 1280x720p), then use CCC to crop it down a little to a custom resolution that fits the screen.

The games I have tried (which are very few since I use it primarily for TV/movie output) allowed me to select the custom resolution for output and it worked perfectly.That works great for 720p and 1080i. Unfortunately, it does not work for 1080p.

If anyone knows how to create a custom resolution for 1080p, I would be very interested in knowing how. Right now, I switch between 1776x1000p and 1920x1080p. This is one feature that I miss from my old nVidia 7600GT with the old nVidia control panel.

-Dave

[topcaser]

Hi Folks,

Rivatuner 2.06 will be released soon. Here some goodies from the development history:


.....
- Improved RV610/RV630 graphics processors families support. The improvements cover wide range of hardware overclocking, diagnostics, fan control and monitoring features.
....
- Improved low-level overclocking tab for ATI R6xx/RV6xx display adapters:
Now RivaTuner supports overclocking on ATI RV6xx display adapters using DPM (Dynamic Power Management) clock frequency adjustment.
- Now RivaTuner restores default clocks on ATI R6xx/RV6xx by means of the driver's PowerPlay table reset if possible.
- Improved low-level fan control tab:
- Improved duty cycle generation accuracy for display adapters using LM63, LM64, F75363 and ADT7473 external I2C fan controllers.
- Added low-level fan control support for ATI RV6xx integrated fan controllers.
.....
- Improved hardware monitoring module:
- Added ATI RV6xx DPM (Dynamic Power Management) technology support. Now RivaTuner is able to monitor dynamically changing RV6xx clock core and memory clock frequencies adjusted in real-time by DPM depending on the GPU usage.
- Added 'Reference fan duty cycle' graph for ATI RV6xx graphics processors families.
....

- Now hardware monitoring graph renderer flushes bitmap caches after each display mode change to help display driver to render the graphs in optimal way. By default flushing is performed within a period of time defined by PostDisplayChangeBitmapFlushPeriod registry entry, the period can be changed by redefining it or the flushing can be disabled completely by setting the period to 0.
- Improved diagnostic report module:
- Improved navigation via the list of diagnostic report categories. Now report preview window is positioned on desired category more accurately when double clicking it in the list of diagnostic report categories.
- Improved PowerPlay table flags decoding in 'ATI VGA BIOS information' diagnostic report category.
- Added MMIO protection fallback support. Now RivaTuner automatically disables MMIO protection, notifies the user and starts in unprotected mode if the protective system is unable to allocate required protected MMIO range aperture (e.g. due to fragmented or limited kernel address space).
- Now RivaTuner uses %RTFolder% macro name when saving a path to external resources (e.g. databases or hardware monitoring log files) stored in the application folder. Power users can disable this feature by setting AllowRelativePathsEncoding registry entry to 0.
- Minor UI changes and improvements.



Maybe some Sapphire owner get the fan noise under control. Some features sounds really good. maybe the cards are able to heavily underclock or undervolt to switch of the fan completely. At the moment i running the GPU at 400MHz - the lowest possible value from CCC ´with fan at 25%, temps at 70 degrees and GPU load at 40% with SD

[vrvideo]

Has anybody observed a strange "Ventian Blind" effect on the 2600XT? I have attached two images (Video 18a and Video 18c) showing a video screen capture of the same point in a video where the screen is fading from a city scene to a white out. Sometimes when I play the video back, the fade is perfect (Video 18a). Other times, the fade occurs at two different rates in an interleaved fashion like venetian blinds (Video 18c). The size of the venetian blinds is much fatter than just video interlace. This is on my 2600XT with CCC 7.10, and both with and without the registry tweaks applied.

If I playback the video on my Xbox media center extender, it always plays back fine.

I have attached a third image (video 1) capturing the venetian blind effect occuring during a camera pan. The scene gets wiggly, again as if some sections are ahead of the others.

I think this venetian blind effect occurs randomly, however, I notice it much more often in big scene change like a fade (Video 18a & 18c) rather than subtle camera pans (Video 1).

[ProgGoblin]

I would also want to know if the picture quality when connecting one of those cards with HDMI to HDTV would be as good as connecting it to a computer LCD.

[topcaser]

Here it is:-)
Just noticed it...

http://forums.guru3d.com//showthread.php?t=242470

[originalsnuffy]

Please forgive my massive level of ignorance...but I gather Rivatuner 2.06 allows one to adjust overclocking on cards like the 2400 and 2600?

If this is true, that is great, since the overclocking adjustments stopped working for me since CCC 2.07 under vista.

If not, what is rivatuner 2.06 for?

[ExDeus]

Thanks!
You've been allot of help.
As I currently use a nVidia card, do you happen to know if there is a similar overacan correction in ForceWare?
Well, this is the ATI HD2000 owners thread, so not sure on that....

I would also want to know if the picture quality when connecting one of those cards with HDMI to HDTV would be as good as connecting it to a computer LCD.
While the PQ is dependent on your video card, the PQ on an HDTV vs an LCD monitor is more of a general difference b/w the displays, not b/w cards.

The picture quality is excellent on my HD2600 via DVI (identical to HDMI), and was a huge improvement over my 9800Pro with a component dongle. I have it hooked up to a 50" 720p LCD RPTV. I can browse and read the web fine from my couch at 10ft.

But, depending on your HDTV and monitor, the native resolution of your monitor is likely higher, so at native resolution, the image might be sharper on a monitor. But if you have an HDTV with a 1080p display, then it might be higher resolution than your monitor, but may not have the same "dot pitch", brightness, contrast ratio, or response time. Regardless, it should be fine from TV-viewing distance, and has more to do with your displays than with any relatively new video card.

[ExDeus]

Now i'm trying to get tv-out to work on my tv so i can surf internet on monitor and watch movies on tv at the same time.
DVI/HDMI or S-video?

[ExDeus]

That works great for 720p and 1080i. Unfortunately, it does not work for 1080p.

If anyone knows how to create a custom resolution for 1080p, I would be very interested in knowing how. Right now, I switch between 1776x1000p and 1920x1080p. This is one feature that I miss from my old nVidia 7600GT with the old nVidia control panel.

-Dave
Have you enabled the 1080p60 checkbox? What happens differently when trying to add a custom 1080p resolution?

[ExDeus]

Please forgive my massive level of ignorance...but I gather Rivatuner 2.06 allows one to adjust overclocking on cards like the 2400 and 2600?
You gathered correctly.

The RV610 is the HD2400 chip; the RV630 is the HD2600 chip.

[originalsnuffy]

This forum is so helpful---a great community.

At least for me, it really looks like 7.10 is in the final stretch to delivering a stable ATI driver platform. I am now trying out the visiontek update, and though it was a short try-out, everything looked pretty good last night on a few hd dvd and h.264 (.mov) files. The haali splitter and quicktime anywhere provide a nice platform for the .mov files to be played back with what looks like proper acceleration in windows media player. PowerDVD does not crash so much anymore (at least with older titles in HD DVD).

Of course every new piece of content presents a technical challenge...but the promise of hi-def on HTPC is starting to peek around the corner!

[topcaser]

Posterization, official statement from:
Solution:
Currently there is no solution.

to:
Solution:
The root cause has been identified and a solution will be provided in the future driver releases.

Hope they fixed it in the next release

[DPlettner]

Have you enabled the 1080p60 checkbox? What happens differently when trying to add a custom 1080p resolution?Yes, I have tried that checkbox. However, the checkbox only forces 1080p if it is not picked up by EDID. Since my TV supports 1080p, it is already there.

In the 720p and 1080i modes, there is an "Add" button that brings up a screen with arrows that allows you to specify a custom resolution. However, if you are in 1080p mode, this button is greyed out.

This bug has been there for a while, and is discussed in the 1080p from ATI card (http://http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=8524762#post8524762) thread.

-Dave

[arfster]

Posterization, official statement from:
Solution:
Currently there is no solution.

to:
Solution:
The root cause has been identified and a solution will be provided in the future driver releases.

Hope they fixed it in the next release


They definitely seem to be going after HTPC bugs atm - that's quite a few now tehy seem to be addressing.

[ExDeus]

This forum is so helpful---a great community.

At least for me, it really looks like 7.10 is in the final stretch to delivering a stable ATI driver platform. I am now trying out the visiontek update...
I have had a very stable experience with 7-10 on the HD2600, but I'm still concerned about what happened with MPEG2 acceleration, particularly for TS files. I'm still not sure that I can detect DXVA is being used, even when DXVA_NOHDDECODE is set to 0. The red-shift problem on NTSC video content still persists when pulldown detection is on, but I haven't had any VPU crashes while browsing the web.

I haven't been able to install the VisionTek or GeCube 8.43 AGP drivers for XP. I get errors. Anybody else?

The first error window is titled "Notify" and has no text, only an OK button.

The second window is also titled "Notify", and states "data.size() != 3" with an OK button.

The installation then fails with with a window stating "Setup failed to run installation: (0x80040707)".

I haven't had time to look into the error code.

[arfster]

An easy way to check if acceleration is on in xp:

1) Dload graphedit:
http://download.softpedia.ro/dl/c325c98bbffb75ff51e9d47c3b0fc749/472a6872/100080912/software/MULTIMEDIA/graphedit9060822.zip

2) register proppage.dll that comes with it(go to dos, browse to dir, regsvr32 proppage.dll)

3) Play some mpeg2 with a media player that allows access to filter properties (MPC is good+free, and doesn't install any crap with it or mess with your settings)

4) Go to VMR9 filter properties, you'll see some new ones courtesy of proppage. Go to VMR9 input0, look at subtype. If it says DXVA, you're sorted :-)

[Ralph3]

I remember in school my teachers would sometimes say, "don't be afraid to ask dumb questions, because someone else might have the same dumb question." Well, here goes... With the 2400 and 2600 series cards, when using HDMI to your TV/monitor, does it make any other sound card (either on-board or add-in) irrelevant? I've read that these cards do have some sort of audio chip on them, so basically, they are an audio and video card all-in-one?
If they are, are these the only cards that work this way? Do any nVidia graphics cards handle audio too?
Thanks.

[ProgGoblin]

While the PQ is dependent on your video card, the PQ on an HDTV vs an LCD monitor is more of a general difference b/w the displays, not b/w cards.

The picture quality is excellent on my HD2600 via DVI (identical to HDMI), and was a huge improvement over my 9800Pro with a component dongle. I have it hooked up to a 50" 720p LCD RPTV. I can browse and read the web fine from my couch at 10ft.

But, depending on your HDTV and monitor, the native resolution of your monitor is likely higher, so at native resolution, the image might be sharper on a monitor. But if you have an HDTV with a 1080p display, then it might be higher resolution than your monitor, but may not have the same "dot pitch", brightness, contrast ratio, or response time. Regardless, it should be fine from TV-viewing distance, and has more to do with your displays than with any relatively new video card.

Well I tired connecting with DVI-HDMI and used 1280X720 res (witch is the only res the card would let me use) and it didn't look as good as when connecting with VGA. It might just be my verry old graphic card (geforse4 4600 ti).

mmm... I wish I could borrow a 2600xt and check it out before buying :P

thanks for the help :)

[karrih]

I'm still not sure that I can detect DXVA is being used, even when DXVA_NOHDDECODE is set to 0.

In XP if you are not using VMR9, you should sooner or later see posterization in SD mpeg2 .ts streams (dark reds turning to orange or to dark red/orange checkerboard pattern) when hardware acceleration with vector adaptive deinterlacing is engaged.

[DPlettner]

Have any of you tried this tweak from the PowerDVD thread? (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=12093011#post12093011)

The levels expansion with HD-DVD has nothing to do with Nvidia...it's PowerDVD Ultra that's doing this.
In the registry, there's a dword at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CyberLink\PowerDVD\HDDVD called COLORSPACE_OPTION
By default, COLORSPACE_OPTION is set to (3), which results in levels expansion for HD-DVD formats. If you set this value to (1), you will retain proper video levels.

Based on the tweaks from Arfster and ExDeus, I assumed that the ATI drivers were expanding the color levels. However, if this PowerDVD tweak works, I might revisit the tweaks and set UseBT601CSC to 0 to prevent SD from being expanded. I won't have a chance to test this until tonight.

-Dave

[arfster]

Based on the tweaks from Arfster and ExDeus, I assumed that the ATI drivers were expanding the color levels.

They are, it happens in all directshow apps. If that reg setting was doing anything, we'd be getting double expansion and the picture would look atrocious (even on a PC levels calibrated monitor large amounts of bright/dark detail would be obliterated).

[BertM]

Has anybody observed a strange "Ventian Blind" effect on the 2600XT? I have attached two images (Video 18a and Video 18c) showing a video screen capture of the same point in a video where the screen is fading from a city scene to a white out. Sometimes when I play the video back, the fade is perfect (Video 18a). Other times, the fade occurs at two different rates in an interleaved fashion like venetian blinds (Video 18c). The size of the venetian blinds is much fatter than just video interlace. This is on my 2600XT with CCC 7.10, and both with and without the registry tweaks applied.

If I playback the video on my Xbox media center extender, it always plays back fine.

I have attached a third image (video 1) capturing the venetian blind effect occuring during a camera pan. The scene gets wiggly, again as if some sections are ahead of the others.

I think this venetian blind effect occurs randomly, however, I notice it much more often in big scene change like a fade (Video 18a & 18c) rather than subtle camera pans (Video 1).

When I try 1080i @ 25 fps I get the same result. Solution for me is to use 1080p to my HD screen instead.
To me it looks like bad re-interlacing. For SD material I can imagine they do this (de-interlace 576i/480i to progressive, scale up to 1080p and then interlace to 1080i [which step goes awfully wrong]). For source material at 1080i there's of course no need to de-interlace/re-interlace, but apparently they do.

I would suggest you file a problem ticket with ATI and see what they think of it.

Bert

[pilotguy7ca]

I just upgraded to the 2600XT from a x800xt and I'm having a few issues:

I have one DVI to VGA adapter hooked up to my Xenarc 700TS and my projector (Infocus 7205) to the component.

1. When I boot the computer the Xenarc comes on for a few seconds (no picture) but then it turns off and goes into standby I'm thinking because it doesn't detect a signal. If I try and take it out of standby, it stay on for a few seconds with no picture and then goes back into standby. If as I boot the computer I hit the TAB button a few times (to show POST info instead of ASUS logo) the screen stays on and everything is fine.

If I just leave the screen off while booting Windows never loads (i tried remoting into it after 5min, and also pinging it). If I check to see where it stopped by turning on the screen, the screen stays black and then goes back into standby. So if I don't successfully get a picture at boot, I need to start all over with hitting the stupid TAB button?

2. I've got my projector set to 1280x720p 60Hz (native resolution) but the picture is horrible compared to my x800xt which I also had connected to a component cable. This picture looks like its got a little bit of static, black appears grey and there are lines scrolling up it. I installed powerstrip to do my custom timings to see if that can fix it and before I change anything its reporting that my refresh rate is 120Hz? although it was set to 60Hz in CCC/windows. If I change it 60 in PS my projector can't get a lock and there is no picture? When I set the resolution in CCC to 640x480, PS then reports that my refresh rate is around 100Hz, but my projector can't handle anything much above 60Hz??

I'm using Catalyst 7.10 but have also tried the 7.5 that came with it - same results.

Thanks.

[systemhalter]

Hello, I have MSI RX2600PRO and Vista Ultimate32 ,every day I receive "Display driver atikmdag stopped responding and has successfully recovered" error, sometimes Vista crashes with no signal to monitor, sometimes still works, I have changed my drivers to 7.10, but still have this problems.....

[shayking]

@ pilotguy7

press F8 simultaneously during bootup/after bios post..then select *Enable VGA Mode*
this will set your Video card to output a standard 640x480 on its main/default output port.

sounds like during your graphic card swap, The card is outputting an incompatible resolution to your Proj. after or before XP logo... or maybe just a weird handshake.....

be sure you are plugged in the Default output on your graphics card.
And always uninstall GPUdrivers when switching GPU's

[pilotguy7ca]

shayking,
I think with my first issue that the card doesn't output a signal right aways on the dvi-vga port, but it does on the Tv out. So if I put my xenarc on the tv out port things should work, then I have to put the pojector on the dvi port. I had a dvi cable coming anyways. Until then I'd like to get it working on the component out.

When a swapped cards I did a complete uninstall and re-install of the catalyst drivers and PS.

I've tried turning the projector on before and after I've botting into XP but no difference.

[my2echo]

I have an HD2900XT card made by Diamond running XP Pro SP2 and CCC 7.10. It works well for outputting HD to my samsung over HDMI but I can't get the sound over HDMI to work. I get stereo from the onboard Realtek system but none from the HDMI link. I'm using the ATI DVI->HDMI adapter. I don't see anything about an ATI sound device in the device manager. Shouldn't there be something there? Nothing shows in the Sounds and Audio Devices in the control panel, either, only the Realtek. Any ideas why it doesn't show up? Also, do I need the Microsoft UAA hidef audio drivers? nothing shows up anywhere that indicates there's an ATI audio device. HELP

[ExDeus]

do I need the Microsoft UAA hidef audio drivers?
Yes... it must be installed before the HD Audio device driver in WinXP.

[DPlettner]

They are, it happens in all directshow apps. If that reg setting was doing anything, we'd be getting double expansion and the picture would look atrocious (even on a PC levels calibrated monitor large amounts of bright/dark detail would be obliterated).You are right. I see no difference in details in dark areas when I toggle setting. Maybe the tweak does something if software rendering is used with nVidia cards, but PDVD appears to ignore the setting with my 2600pro.

-Dave

[pakk]

First let me state that I have not read each and every post in this thread. Way too many. I did read what I could handle.

I just got my sapphire HD2600XT the other day. So far, I am a little un happy with results. It is buggier and the image quality is not better than my older geforce3 TI200. As of right now, I would be happy with it running bug free.

My two issues seems to be th common ones.
1. Random screen glitching. Hard to really describe. It is more frequent when the movie first loads or after you select play from the dvd menu. It does continue consistantly throughout the movie, but seems to be less frequent with time.

2. When I have the movie minimized to a window and open another window, the system seems to hang. It will often go blank when come back with a VPU error.

So far after reading this thread I have, disabled my on board audio, ran the ExDues's reg tweak, and raised my HTPC resolution from 1280x720 to 1920x1080. I figure running at the native resolution would be best, but this seems to have resolved the momentary glitching. THe only drawback is the my desktop is an eyesore to look at.

How I play movies is. I back the DVD up to my hard drive in full using DVD shrink then play the movie using VLC. I like VLC because it is cheap and strait to the point. I open it and click play.

I have latest CCC drivers and ran driver cleaner pro before install.

I will watch a full movie tommorow to see if the glitchin is resolved. I was only able to watch for about 30 min or so which was glitch free.

As far as the multiple window, is there a fix for this?

Lastly, is there a way for me to improve image quality?

--pakk

[topcaser]

shayking,
I think with my first issue that the card doesn't output a signal right aways on the dvi-vga port, but it does on the Tv out. So if I put my xenarc on the tv out port things should work, then I have to put the pojector on the dvi port. I had a dvi cable coming anyways. Until then I'd like to get it working on the component out.

When a swapped cards I did a complete uninstall and re-install of the catalyst drivers and PS.

I've tried turning the projector on before and after I've botting into XP but no difference.
Had similar problems and struggled with the ATI support as well as with other forums. Did not solved the problem. The DVI out port you connected your monitor to, does (!!) send a signal anyway, because i connected another monitor to it and that worked. Propably the card send a resolution/frequency combo the monitor dont understand. BTW: I had two 2600xt (one Palit, one Sapphire) and one 2400 XT (Sapphire). Both 2600XT had this problem. The 2400 XT not at all.

Anyway: My problem is as follows:
Get no signal first. I connected, as you stated, the LCD to TVout and was able to install drivers. If i now restart the system i get again no signal first. But then, when windows boots up and has loaded the VGA drivers, the signal comes back again...

Dont know why, but i thought, a VGA card and its connected medium exchanges display information. Maybe there is something going wrong in the VGA BIOS...

I have now connected another monitor to the second DVI and there is no problem at all with this.

[topcaser]

Hi,

i installed my HTPC with Vista (Normally i am using XP). After installing CCC there, it let me adjust 350 MHz.

XPs CCC has minimum frequency 400MHz.

Furthermore in XP CCC adjust 110Mhz in idel mode automatically. In Vista not at all (is this true? It never clocked below the adjusted freuqency during my tests)

Is it also possible, to adjust a value below 400MHz in XP, maybe with a registry tweak? Where does these values (minimum and maximum adjustable values come from)?

[Siriusfilms]

This posting is my last resort for fixing a rather annoying issue with my Sapphire 2400XT (a replacemtne to my Sapphire 2400Pro which couldn't play Blu-Ray without consistent driver failure). Though I could with my PRO, I can NOT with my XT get 2 monitors (1 20" Wide LCD via VGA D-Sub 50' Cable & 1 Rear Projection HDTV 1080i via Component) to work simultaneously. I can only have one or the other monitor working at a time. I don't even get the monitors to show the POST screens. Only one or the other will show POST info. CCC will only allow me to switch between monitors in Basic Mode. Every time I try to enable the second monitor either in the Display Settings in Windows or in CCC, the enablement seems to work for a second, then it flashes back to disabled. I've done quite a bit of searching through this forum and I subscribe to Sapphire's forum. I have not found anyone else with this issue in my searching. Should I not expect this card to function in Dual/Extended Monitor mode with a VGA/D-sub connection and a Component? I HAVE checked FORCE TV Detection in CCC.

I also did have a problem with Out Of Sync Errors until I found a posting in Sapphire's forum where someone disabled the EDID. I guess my Sceptre 20"W or the fact its connected on a 50' cable is not compatible with EDID. This fixed my not being given the option of a 1680x1050 resolution probably because the 2400XT was set at a Sync rate far to high for that res. I could only choose 1440x900 or 1600x1200 which was the wrong dimension.

So my question still is do I need to use the DVI to connect to the HDTV? This is NOT recommended on this Mitsubishi as I was first told it can burn out something if the wrong signal is sent through the DVI connection. I'm hoping SOMEONE has an idea or if I might just have a defective card.

Below is the System Configuration:
Operating System: Vista Ultimate 32bit (joined to Windows Server AD Domain)
Motherboard: FOXCONN G9657MA-8EKRS2H
CPU: C2Duo E4400 2.0GHz
RAM: 2x1GB Dual Channel Crucial 533MHz
Video Card: Sapphire 2400XT 256MB DDR3 RAM (replaced a Sapphire 2400PRO that supported Dual Monitors, BUT would not play Blu-Ray without consistent crashing of Video Drivers in Vista)
PSU: ULTRA 500W at 34A on 1 12V rail.
Monitors: 20" Wide Sceptre LCD via VGA/D-sub & Mitsubishi RearPrj. HDTV via Component
Hard drives: WD 750GB Sata II
Optical Drives: Philips Blu-Ray Player/Recorder
Additional PCI cards: ATI TV Wonder 650 Analog+ATSC TV Tuner
Number of fans present: TOO MANY, but I can explain. This was my first HTPC built YEARS ago with a P4HT 3.2GHz on a 915 Mobo that ran HOT! I've since gutted it for upgrade to new 965 MoBo to run the Core2Duo and DDR2 RAM. To reduce internal heat on the first incarnation of this PC I had to mount the PSU OUTSIDE on the back of my media cabinet, AND I have a 120mm exhaust fan on the back as well. Not to mention the PSU's dual Fan configuration is mounted so the air gets pulled out of the media cabinet where the HTPC sits and through the externally mounted PSU as well. There's a 60mm in the HTPC Case in front under the Blu-Ray, an 80mm SuperCat with a converter to fit the 60mm case exhaust opening over the CPU which now is a MUCH cooler running C2Duo E4400. There is another 60mm mounted where the PSU opening would be on the case leaving enough room for all the cables to run out the case to the back of the cabinet. Most importantly to this discussion I have a PCI exhaust blower fan right next to/on top of the Heatsink for the HD2400XT Video Card.
Video Card Drivers in Use: Catalyst 7.10, Driver Package 8.421, T550 Pro Driver 6.14.10
Motherboard Drivers Used: Just check the FOXCONN website and there's no drivers listed newer than the re-build date of this HTPC approx. 7/20/07 except for a RAID driver, but I am not running RAID storage drivers as I have the single 750GB SATA drive.

[ToLive]

Just got my MSI RX2600XT-T2D512EZ Radeon HD 2600XT (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127298) card yesterday, but so far so confusing:

1. The card package does not come with a DVI-HDMI adapter (although the product image shows it), so I just connect my PC to LCD TV using a DVI-HDMI cable, but NOTHING happens, totally blank screen, on my PC control panel, it simply doesn't detect it.
My question: Do I have buy an ATI made DVI-HDMI adapter in order to make it work? Anyone ever made this card work through a DVI-HDMI cable without using the ATI DVI-HDMI adapter?

2. I have a SONY 720P LCD that supports 1360x768, before I got this ATI card, I was using a NVIDIA 7600GT card to connect to the TV and I didn't get any problem, the NVIDIA card detected the 1360x768 and export as full screen. Now the MSI 2600XT does detect the 1360x768 resolution, but when I switch to it, I get blank screen, currently, the closest supported resolution I can get is 1280x768.
My question: Is there any way I can make the card support 1360x768 (through CCC?)?

To be honest, I didn't realize that setting up an ATI card is so difficult, almost 24 hours, on my TV, I go nothing worked.

[blingo]

Just got my MSI RX2600XT-T2D512EZ Radeon HD 2600XT (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127298) card yesterday, but so far so confusing:

1. The card package does not come with a DVI-HDMI adapter (although the product image shows it), so I just connect my PC to LCD TV using a DVI-HDMI cable, but NOTHING happens, totally blank screen, on my PC control panel, it simply doesn't detect it.
My question: Do I have buy an ATI made DVI-HDMI adapter in order to make it work? Anyone ever made this card work through a DVI-HDMI cable without using the ATI DVI-HDMI adapter?

2. I have a SONY 720P LCD that supports 1360x768, before I got this ATI card, I was using a NVIDIA 7600GT card to connect to the TV and