ATi vs NVIDIA for TV out

[DancesWithLysol]

Greetings,

As I mentioned in another thread, my Athlon 64 upgrade didn't go as well as I would have liked. I believe there is an issue with the motherboard (VIA chipset) and the PVR-250 since I see problems with both BTV and the Win2000 application which Hauppauge ships with their cards.

Anyway, instead of fighting this forever and screwing up a bunch of recordings I've decided to revert back to my P3 based system.

Just for kicks (and based on the recommendation of people on this board) I decided to grab a cheap GeForce FX 5200 instead of using my Radeon 8500 which I had been using for my HTPC machine for about a year.

So, I setup the dual-P3 based machine and installed windows. The first thing I should mention is that it is a lot easier to get drivers from NVIDIA's site than ATi's site when you are running at a really poor resolution.

When I installed the latest drivers from NVIDIA I went and tried to set things up the way I liked running when I was using the ATi card. I had my monitor running at 1280x960@85Hz and the TV was running at a much lower resolution (800x600@60Hz) but is sort of "followed the cursor" so it only saw a subset of the pixels that I was showing on the monitor. When I went into full screen mode (and with BTV set to run at 800x600) the monitor and TV were both set to 60Hz and 800x600.

I was able to get the image to go to the monitor OR the TV, but not both at the same time. The options for Clone which I saw in a number of references on the internet wasn't available to me. I only could get the standard display mode which means one or the other.

Oh, the other item I wanted to test was image quality. I had my Athlon 64 system (with the 8500 in it) outputting as to different source on my receiver both showing the same windows desktop.

When switching between them the image quality was identical. The limitation is definitely the 27" TV they were both plugged in to. I just wanted to see for myself what was the deal because I had heard a number of people talk about image quality from ATi and NVIDIA cards for S-Video output.

My summary of the situation:

ATi has a more flexible control panel for dealing with TV-out and using a monitor at the same time. I checked around and a number of people seem to be having the same problem. I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything "wrong" when installing the 5200 either.

If anyone has any suggestions to bring the NVIDIA card up to par, I'm interested.

Thx in advance.

[cmasters]

As far as SVideo image quality, I found the 5200 to put out a more detailed Windows Desktop, but my ATI (9000) put out better video. Both do a good job but I did end up running with the ATI.