On Monday 22 August 2005 10:24 pm, Mark Gardner wrote: > Can anyone comment on the quality comparison between the two > abovementioned chipsets? > > Advantages / Disadvantages, I have a 350 and have struggled on and off > now for about 5 months to get it to work (Got it to work once but then > the HD died). > Mostly interested in quality of TV playback. > > Thanks
I used a 350 for many months before recently switching to NVidia. I can say from my experience that the 350's TV-out quality is definitely superior. It is simply beautiful. There are no interlacing artifacts in motion scenes or anything. I think this is due to it outputting a proper interlaced signal, directly sending the fields from the stream....I could be wrong on this though. I think I remember reading somewhere that it has combing filters built into it. So either those filters work really damn well or my guess above is true to some extent. I have a FX5200 now and am not quite completely satisfied with the quality. Although good, the picture has a "softness" to it compared to a straight signal into my TV (could this be due to my 480x480 recordings having to be scaled to the 640x480 resolution???), and of course I have to deal with all the interlacing issues. I really don't want to have to use de-interlacing methods. Methods like kernel and linear blend seem to cause a jittery or not perfectly fluid picture in high motion (I was watching a baseball game on Live TV when messing with these settings recently), one field has its obvious disadvantage, and Bob, although perfectly smooth and fluid feeling, also has the disadvantage of the flicker and losing half the horizontal lines per "frame." I've looked for hours for ways to perfect the NVidia output, including a fair chunk of the archives, but haven't found much. Everything I find is for HD video. I found a couple sites that gave some interlaced modelines, but none that I tried worked. Always had hsync or vsync out of range errors (I thought I read that newer NVidia drivers broke interlaced modelines anyway). I'm currently just running the normal "640x480" mode. I must say that watching movies and such is excellent with the NVidia. The progressive content looks beautiful, and I probably wouldn't be able to tell a difference between the NVidia and a DVD player. It is nice and smooth, and one of the main reasons I switched over. Plus you can do timestretch when watching recordings (such a valuable feature), run all the game emulators nicely, have nice music visualizations, etc. Although the 350 driver is getting much better with Xv support, my tests have convinced me that it just isn't quite there yet, and still isn't the solution for everything. Most of the game emulators don't support Xv as far as I know. One other thing to note is that I don't think the 350 decoder is really that rock solid. Pauses for extended periods of time caused my decoder and frontend to lock, and the decoder would freak out when doing really fast FF/RW for more than 5 seconds or so. I just always had to worry when doing things besides simply playing the video, afraid of the decoder locking up and such. Also, the decoder is slower to respond to jumps, seeks, etc. Overall though, I believe that the benefits of using NVidia far outweigh the benefits of using the 350 (which, really I believe only consists of the perfect TV-out quality). On a side note, if anyone has any tips, modelines, etc for making the NVidia output beautiful, please do tell. My dream is to have no progressive "conversion" between the video stream and the output, as it seems to be now. I wish it would be possible to simply take my recording, don't think that it's being displayed on a computer monitor, and just pass those fields right through to the TV....something like that... I'm not extremely familiar with the in-depth technical side of all this, so if I sound ignorant, please inform instead of flame :-) I just hate to use de-interlacing, but I also hate to see those ugly interlacing artifacts! ~Lou
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