[morganw]

Why not use the on-board video of a motherboard with a chipset such as nForce or SiS650?


In the bad old days, the scaling and color space conversion of the overlay surface done by the video hardware might not be good. I don't know if everyone's good at it now, but the Video2000 test is now unsupported & no one reports results in that vein.


Modern video cards (e.g. Radeon) might do iDCT and motion compensation on the card, but a 1GHz PIII seems able to do decoding without that.


So, why not on-board video?


For an application space, suppose I'm not playing video games and suppose further I'm just looking for a DVD player with a digital connection to the scaler/deinterlacer to feed a projector and I won't be using dScaler (I don't have any analog sources worthy of projecting).


Asus's SiS650 board has a SPDIF out option, so if I'm going to use the DTS/Dolby decoders in my receiver, I don't need a hi-fi, 6 channel audio card. I should be able to get by with just the motherboard stuffed with SDRAM and the CPU, a boot drive, DVD-ROM drive, IR receiver and power supply. It should fit in a 1U case.


-M


{I picked SiS650 instead of a PIII video-included chipset because I have another application that's very CPU intensive in mind and I want an easier (quieter) to cool Northwood vs. Athlon XP.}

 

[Namlemez]

If the Radeon hadn't come out and people were still using NVidia cards a lot, something like the Nforce might not be bad. I have one and would probably be using it, except I had a Radeon LE lying around. If Nvidia would put the 10 bit DACs of the GF4 cards on the Nforce boards, we might be.

 

[morganw]

Quote:

Originally posted by Namlemez ...If Nvidia would put the 10 bit DACs of the GF4 cards on the Nforce boards

So is lack of precision the primary strength of Radeon for properly-flagged film-sourced DVD playback?


Please notice my caveats: I know some Radeons do a (good?) job at motion-adaptive deinterlacing in hardware, but besides that, is it just DAC wordsize? Is my guess that overlay scaling and colorspace conversion pretty good even on cheap video subsystems (e.g. SiS) these days?


I have seen praise of one card (forget which) that not only had more precision in the DACs, but also more in the overlay buffer so more bits were available before color space conversion.


-M