BTV video problems with new ATI 4670 video card

[GoAWest]

I have a home-built PC (Win XP SP3, Asus A8N-SLI Premium mobo, Athlon X2 2GHz, 2G ECC RAM, RAID C:, 2.5TB of additional video storage; four HDHRs on 1GE LAN) now used as a dedicated HTPC with BTV 4.9.2 (last six months). It's had a 5 year old nVidia 7800 GT PCIe-x16 video card that had worked OK (played 480p, 720p, 1080i smoothly using BTV Overlay) but I started having problems recently. Specifically, the machine would occasionally spontaneously reboot when playing (esp. when fast skipping fwd) high def (1080i for sure) shows. The minidump reported the culprit as the "nv4_disp.dll" (part of the nVidia driver) going into an "infinite loop." I played around with this, upgrading and downgrading the nVidia driver etc. but no fix.

I finally gave up and just picked up an *ATI* 4670 (1G DDR3) PCIe card, $60 after assorted rebates (if I send them in) to replace the older nVidia card (and, more importantly, the driver). The deinstall of the old nVidia card & driver and installation of the new ATI card & driver (latest from AMD/ATI website) was quick and easy.

However, I'm already dissatisfied with the image quality. In BTV Overlay mode the 720p and 1080i picture looks fine but the SD 480p videos are unwatchable--constant "jumpiness/jerkiness" in the images. Switching BTV to 3D Accelerated *and* HW deinterlacing got rid of that 480p "jerky" problem although the high def (1080i) images didn't look nearly as good (e.g. overexposed/cakey skin tones even after tweaking settings). And the 480p still has a problem in that the image seems to "flicker" back and forth between light and dark.

I'm played around with most of the "Catalyst Control Center" options as well as the few (23" ACER, DVI to PC) monitor settings and haven't made any headway. There is no "don't look like crap" option as far as I can tell. I've tried other BTV video codecs but all the others looked worse.

Any advice here? My current options are between the old nVidia 7800 GT which provides a fine picture but whose driver causes the PC to reboot *or* a "new & improved" ATI 4670 that produces a crappy picture. The ATI card specs seemed totally adequate for SD & HD TV (no gaming). Do I need a better video card? A higher end ATI card or a higher-end nVidia card (although I'm concerned that the same nVidia driver would result in the same reboots)? New or different drivers, video settings that I haven't tried?

[HomeyFour]

Originally Posted by GoAWest

Any advice here? My current options are between the old nVidia 7800 GT which provides a fine picture but whose driver causes the PC to reboot *or* a "new & improved" ATI 4670 that produces a crappy picture.

I would try some o-l-d nVidia drivers. Like, the first or second release that supports your card.

[GoAWest]

I may consider that (old nVidia drivers) although I had already tried several old versions as well as the newest.

For the moment I'm continuing to play with CCC settings with the ATI card. I finally eliminated the light-dark-light SD behavior by turning *off* the HW deinterlace (an option when you turn on 3D Accel rather than Overlay in BTV). Some SD (480p) vidoes then showed some tight horizontal lines during motion but I've minimized that by playing with some of the other CCC de-interlace settings.

My biggest issue now is needing to fiddle with the color options to get a decent non-washed-out picture (different for SD, HD, full screen vs. window). Overlay was better with the colors but I still can't go back to that since although HD looks fine, SD is unusable (extreme jerky video).

[GoAWest]

I finally gave up on the ATI video card. The inability of the ATI 4670 & drivers to work (with SD 480p!?) video in Overlay mode coupled with the "harsh" look and frequent horizontally lines (combing?) on SD video in SD Accel (HW deinterlace off) was a show stopper. For the short term I've reverted to my old nVidia 7800 GT card along with the latest nVidia 191.07 driver (after a full uninstall of the old nVidia driver and ATI driver, and install of the new nVidia driver). A shame since the ATI 4670 was an idea fit for my system (reasonable performance but much lower power than the old card).

This is now the second system (ASUS A8N-SLI mobo + ATI 4670; MA78GPM-UD2H [integrated ATI 3200]) that has given me similar poor behavior under Windows XP SP3 with recent ATI video drivers. In the case of the MA78GPM mobo, a year old ATI driver worked much better than ones from from recent months, but the ultimate "cure" was Windows 7 (RC1; haven't gotten around to installing the released version) along with a recent (9.9; haven't bothered with 9.10) ATI driver.

Have others had problems with recent ATI video drivers on an XP system? As I said, in Overlay mode (which looks a lot better in general), my symptom was "jittery" video but *only* with SD 480p video--720p and 1080i video looked fine. The 3D Accel "fallback" stopped that but at the cost of "harsh" video that was difficult to watch no matter how much I fiddled with the Catalyst settings.

If the nv4_disp.dll crashing returns, I don't know if I'll go ahead and try a newer nVidia card, keep looking for and trying random old nVidia drivers [http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html], or resort to a Windows 7 upgrade. Would be a shame (cost, effort) with my BTV system since it's otherwise stable and the OS GUI is irrelevant.

[jrandeck]

I use integrated ATI 3200 graphics for BTV, but I haven't seen any jittery playback with SD. The problems I had with SD were with loss of detail which I finally traced back to the more advanced hardware deinterlacing options, so I use the simpler ones now and SD works fine.

I'm running XP SP3 and I believe I have version 8.9 of the ATI drivers. I've read on AVSForum that the 9.10 driver finally fixes the vector adaptive deinterlacing issues, but I haven't tried it yet. For now what I have is working, so I'm not in a hurry to change it.

I have a 4670 in another PC that doesn't have BTV on it. I had all sorts of problems with it and ended up needing to upgrade the BIOS on the motherboard to fix it (it turned out that the old BIOS didn't support the newer ATI cards.) I was getting symptoms that ranged from stuttering, pixelation, completely scrambled video and system lockups on that PC before the BIOS upgrade. I'll have to try to watch a standard def video in MPG format on it and see how that looks.

[GoAWest]

I could drop back to to a "really old" ATI driver like you were using, but that might not work with some off the newer (even mid-range) video cards.

My mobo is a kind of old ASUS A8N-SLI Preium, from 2004--I think I've got a BIOS around 1011 or so. The last BIOS that ASUS released for it was in 2007 (v 1805) and I could give that a shot. I'm hesitant to upgrade BIOSes when things are (more or less) working.

I was looking at a BFG GeForce 9800 GT card at the store today for $90. Single-wide, DVIx2 (VGA adapter, but no HDMI), relatively low power (doesn't need the 12V conn to the power supply). I could give that try although it's a crap shoot whether a newer GeForce card would work better than the older 7800 GT I have now given that it's the same driver (assorted nv4_disp.dll) that's been crashing.

[jrandeck]

I don't know whether the BIOS upgrade would help you, especially since there's nothing out there new enough. I thought I'd share my experience in case it helped. I never would have thought that I'd need a BIOS upgrade to support a new video card until it happened to me.

(The PC in question has an ASRock 4 Core Dual VSTA motherboard which doesn't have new enough support from the manufacturer, but I was lucky enough to find a third party BIOS that fixes the problem. A risky solution, I know, but I figured worst case I'd have an excuse to upgrade my motherboard.)