Powerful card comes up short.
Written: Feb 13 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Powerful card.
Cons: Poor dvd decoding.
The Bottom Line: The card may be good for gaming and graphics, but not definitely not for its dvd decoding capabilities.
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| SlowBobo's Full Review: ATI Radeon 64MB DDR |
The reason I write this opinion is because I found one of the features of the Radeon to be extremely lacking in performance. The Radeon 64ddr card is advertised as having superior dvd decoding. I got the card for that purpose (in addition to it being a very good graphics card). I had been using a Permedia 3 video card for my computer and had ran extremely well for most applications, but under Windows 2000, the computer could not run dvd's very well. The computer; a Pentium 3 133 fsb, Tyan S1854 Trinity motherboard with Via Apollo Pro 133 chipset, 384 megs pc133 memory, with Creative Ovation 12x dvd player.
The computer ran dvd's perfectly under Windows 98, but not under Windows 2000. While it played the movies under 2000 using Interplay's windvd software that was packaged on Creative's software disc, the playback was jumpy. At times the picture would superimpose itself and you would see a movie have a second image (though faint) appear on a different part of the monitor. I had been running a dual boot for playing dvd's under Windows 98, but I wanted to just run the computer with Windows 2000. I didn't have a dvd decoder, and thought with one, the performance should be a lot better. I also didn't want to get a decoder card because I didn't have the PCI slots available. This prompted me to get a video card with the dvd decoder feature.
Basically the performance of the ATI card for dvd's was lacking with 98 and 2000. They were about equally good, and the movies came out really dark, and brightness didn't help the playback. Also, the picture was more grainy than before as well. The darkness and grainy quality affected other dvd playing programs as well (besides using the ATI dvd utility). I found the playback to be problematic with Interplay's Windvd and Cyberlink's PowerDVD (under 98). I had downloaded the latest drivers from ATI, as well as Microsoft. The dvd playback was a little better, but not enough to make movies watchable. All things considered, the card's performance is very good for gaming, and graphic intensive applications. I haven't used it for the motion capture, so no comment on how that works, or the output to a television. I am just writing regarding the poor performance for dvd playback on a monitor, despite its good performance otherwise.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 188.99
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Epinions.com ID:
SlowBobo
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Location: USA
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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