[MPlayer-users] files in ftp/incoming

Arpi arpi at thot.banki.hu
Thu Nov 1 22:59:41 CET 2001


Hi,

>  Nvidia would be the cheapest and fastest 3D, low picture quality but they
I've read about this some time ago somewhere. It was explained why are
nvidia cards so bad quality. The chips itself are good enough. The main
problem is that nvidia itself doesn't produce cards, just chips. Cards are
done by other companies. And the manufacturers of the cheap variants usually
add a low frequency filter to the RAMDAC to get the FCC rules/tests passed.
(instead of building a high-quality amplifier and noise filter - but it
costs much more). It decreases image quality (pixel bandwith) a lot!

> produce their own drivers for linux/X - good thing, but releasing specs
> would be better. i.e. - nvidia 'binary shit' on some medium-high end

this is my main problem with nvidia. their binary shit is really shit
sometimes, and they doesn't seem to fix bugs fast.
for example, Xv on TNT2 is still buggy. there was the bottom green/purple
lines artifact, they fixed it in the latest release but now they have
problems with mouse cursor - color keying isn't refreshed so you can see
a block if move cursor away from video window. GATOS had the same problem
once but was fixed very fast. Afaik geforce Xv drivers are really ok.
Btw i've heard many times that nvidia divers cause system hangup (only
reset help). I had no such problems with matrox or ati cards.

the other problem is linux. yes, i'm using linux and most of you are using
linux, but there are solaris and bsd users too. nvidia doesn't release
drivers for them, while opensource drivers works.

> system produces video quality way lower that my low-end system with g450.
> and g450 would be 'baad' since matrox keeps it specs secret, and last
> decent card was g400.

g450/g550 only differs from g400 in the second head. they've changed crtc2
to something new, with higher ramdac bandwith and totally different (and
worse) tv-out. and all this is now built-in into the main chip, while it was
a separated chip on g400.

only specs of this new tv-out stuff is unreelased, because macrovision stuff.
note that it wasn't released for g400 too, but matroxfb guys did some
reverse engineering of windows drivers (comparing register values in monitor
and tvout modes).

i think tvout specs won't be released, it is macrovision license stuff, card
manufacturers can't do anything with it. matrox solved it releasing libHAL,
a small binary static library to do tv-out stuff, and using it in the
opensource drivers.


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
mailto:arpi at thot.banki.hu
http://esp-team.scene.hu



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