[MPlayer-users] best graphical card for mplayer

[Vladimir Mosgalin]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Attila Kinali wrote:

AK>At the moment, i'd say either a Matrox G550 or one of the
AK>supported ATI cards (ie one that is a bit older than those
AK>which the game kiddies buy).
AK>Personaly i'd go for the Matrox as they tend to have
AK>the better picture than other cards (though i've not
AK>seen any newer ATI card, so i cant say anything about
AK>their picture quality).
AK>Something that you should definitly not buy is an
AK>nvidia based card. Both their image quality and
AK>their driver support is poor.

Why so? I just returned my radeon 8500le and thinking of exchanging it
to something a little more powerfull. Geforce 4ti seems like a good
choice. I want to play game sometimes; I don't need very powerfull card,
but I want to run some windows game under wine and tune some opengl
settings.  This isn't possible with ati. Drivers from ati lack almost
everything - they have dumb license and can't be included in linux
distribution without special agreement, so everyone has to install
kernel sources and compile driver by themselves. You can't use tv-out in
XFree with them, so they aren't good for video playing. If you want to
play game, you can't change _any_ of opengl settings, even force
anisotropic filtering or fsaa. You can't use hardware idct and mc. You
can't use ati's powerful hardware deinterlacer. Nvidia driver has those
and may other features (I doubt about deinterlacer, though, but I think
if it is there, it is available under linux). So basically, ati just
sucks under linux in all ways. I wouldn't recommend everyone ati card if
he uses linux as main os.

And about image quality, on a descent system one can use swscaler.
Quality of bicubic one is the same as the highest-quality overlays, and
2ghz system needs less then 35% of cpu power to display 1024x768 fs. So
you can just buy faster processor, use -vo x11 and this problem is gone.

But I don't think that modern nvidia cards have problems with quality
(I'm not talking about chinese noname cards ;). Ati and matrox had the
best quality, but gf4ti and fx have the same or almost the same...

-- 

Vladimir