Frank Lynch wrote: >On 1/21/06, Chris Ribe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >>I'm in a similar situation to you, Frank, and I am looking for an answer to >>the same question. >> >>From what I've gathered so far, the NVidia 5200 series seem to work the >>best. I'd like to hear more confirmation on that before I go drop $40 on >>one, though. >> >> >Does the amount of video ram play a factor? >The 5200 seems to come with either 128 or 256mb of ram. >I'd like to have my graphics card do as much work as possible, I want >ot keep my cpu for tasks like commercial flagging (and occasional >transcoding). > > RAM is not a problem. It's primarily important for 3D rendering with many textures, so the 128MB will work well (be way more memory than you need) for HD MPEG-2 decoding.
As far as best card goes, the best card is one whose drivers support the functionality you need. Right now, this means NVIDIA. Don't get ATI. The 6xxx series (at least some of them--there may be one or two "holdovers" in the group) of NVIDIA cards use pixel shaders for Xv (instead of the video overlay used by previous generations). Myth has been designed to work well with the video-overlay-based Xv (including providing an ability to adjust hue/saturation/brightness), and still has work to be done for providing better support for the PS-based video. Therefore, you're probably better off going with a 5200 than a 6800+--unless, of course, you want to do some GLSL programming for Myth... ;) Also, you won't get better MPEG-2 performance (including display of software-decoded MPEG-2 /and/ hardware-assisted MPEG-2 decoding with XvMC) from a "faster" or newer card. And, on the bright side, the 5200 is dirt-cheap compared to the newer-generations of cards, so save your money and go for a 5200. Mike _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users