best video card for divx playback?

[twist]

I've used ATI all in wonder 128 pro, TNT2, GEForce4 and my vote is actually for the TNT2. I'm going to move from 98 to XP as soon as I have time(2-3 weeks) and try again.


I was wondering if anyone else had opinions/insight on this topic. Video card comparisons seem kind of overlooked.

thanks!

[Rooster6975]

No video cards on the market do MPEG4 hardware acceleration yet.

Divx movies are encoded using codecs based on the MPEG4 standard. You would need hardware acceleration of MPEG4 if you really wanted the video card to make much of a difference. Other than that, any good 2D card should be able to do the trick. Since no video card has DivX hardware acceleration, what counts is the speed of your processor as it will be doing all of the calculations in order to display your divx film.

If you want hardware divx acceleration, have a look at the new SigmaDesigns card which is their next generation Hollywood +. It will accelerate both DVDs and DivX (MPEG2 and MPEG4).

Rooster

[twist]

moving the slider bar under hardware accelleration options causes definite differences in the playback quality, try it and see. I'm not at all interested in "theory" , give me specific cards please. ATI all in wonder 128 & the creative labs "Encore" card both do excellent MPEG2 hardware decoding in my experience. But the video cards I've used differ substantially playing back divx .avi's in MP 6.4 (divx 3.11,4.0, &4.1- haven't encoded w/ 5. yet!) on a via 266a based board(AOPEN) , 512mb pc133, athlon t-bird 1.4ghz off of both hard disk(ata100) & SCSI2 CD-ROM. So clearly, it does come down to video card differences.

[Rooster6975]

There is nothing theoretical about it.

You are correct when you say that the Hardware acceleration slider will affect the image quality, however I believe you think it is doing something that it is not. That slider will control how Windows plays back the media within the Media Player, and how much CPU power is required compared to Graphics Adapter power. Setting it to Full, will enable Hardware Overlay mode and will offload the CPU, relying heavily on your Graphic Adapters computational abilities. This is not 3D polygons by any stretch of the imagination, what you are looking for here is 2D power.

Setting the slider to none will enable Software rendering mode. You will always get a better image in Hardware Overlay mode. Software rendering will rely almost entirely on your CPU to compute what you see, and will limit the resolution you can achieve. In Hardware Overlay mode, your graphics adapter is creating the hardware overlay surface, not the CPU. To play back DivX, you should compare the Hardware Overlay modes of each of your graphic cards. If you are not interested in Gaming, cards from Matrox historically have the best 2D overlay for the home user. They do support some 3D features, but have been largely left in the dust by ATI and Nvidia based cards however still control a significant portion of the desktop market due to their 2D strengths.

The last thing you should know is that Hardware Overlay is dependent on good drivers. Microsoft will often recommend that you move the slider closer to None if you are having crashing problems related to video. They do this to see if your Hardware Overlay mode of your graphics adapter is buggy. It is possible that the cards with which you tried to watch DivX with simply had different generations of drivers, some better at overlay, some worse. If you used the latest versions of the drivers, this should not be an issue. By in large, setting it all the way to Full *should* give you the best image and any card very strong in 2D (traditionally Nvidia cards are not very good at 2D, although the GF3's and GF4's seem to have fixed that issue) should give you the highest quality DivX playback you can get.

I would recommend this order for DivX quality playback in full Hardware Overlay mode :

Matrox
ATI
Nvidia

Rooster