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What's the Best "All In One" Video Card?
Magorak asks: "Ok. We all know there's all kinds of video cards out there on the market. Well, I've been trying like mad to find a video card that will give me everything. Literally. I want to have awesome 3D graphics, but I'm also big on multimedia so I want something that does video capture, has a TV tuner, and does DVD. Voodoo's got the V3-3500 but I've heard bad things about the tuner/capture; ATI's got their All In Wonder series but I can't find actual pictures of the 3D graphics and the AIW I have now sucks when it comes to 3D. Is there a real combo card that will give me all of the wicked 3D, plus awesome multimedia options? Ideally, something like a hybrid between Voodoo3 & ATI. Is there a real solution? "
I have a Matrox Marvel G200, and it is a GREAT 2D card for Xfree.
Apparently it does pretty good 3D with other less free GUI's, also.
But the new Marvel G400 is supposed to be a great 3D card, I believe
the specs are open and it should be among the first with good Linux 3D
support.
While Matrox has been very supportive of XFree in releasing specs for
the display adapter, apparently they haven't been quite as open with
the video capture (supports hardware mjpeg, yummm). So the capture
driver is still in development, but coming along.
FWIW,
Barry Roberts
How's your current AIW card (the one with the lousy 3d)as a TV tuner? And what model number is it?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I bought a used All-In-Wonder Pro about 4 months ago, it's video capture is top notch, I don't know if it's the software or the hardware, but I've seen some hauppage-type video capture stuff and my AIW pro blows that away. The hauppage stuff can't do full screen which GATOS does easily.
As for 3d, I picked up a pair of Voodoo2's for $70 on Ebay, you can set them up for SLI which gives you twice the 3d power as just one board. If you have two pci and one agp slot, and your computure is well cooled, then I think that this is the way to go.
Matrox *still* has some work to do on it's OpenGL drivers: they released some that work for most games (mostly I'm interested in Tribes) but it's a bit of a pain to upgrade to them.
The video capture itself is perfect. Mind you, I've got an Athlon 600 system. But full frame rate, full quality, no problem. The TV output is quite clear, and watching cable in a window takes no noticible CPU. Plus, DuelHead support, which is pretty cool but I haven't used it much yet.
The only reason that I wouldn't recommend it is if games are your top priority: like I said, Matrox makes really high performing video cards, but they are getting killed due to their poor driver support.(great hardware, weak software support). I haven't tried anything other than 2D under Linux yet, but that gives me as high a resolution as I'm looking for (1600 x 1200).
I have the Guillemot Cougar Video Edition card. It has great TNT2 3d with video capture and TV out. I have been very happy with this card.
The AIW 3D grahics are lame, but the TV tuner software (Linux and Windows) and image quaility is by far the best. I really don't play games and well the ATI 3D support in Linux is just starting. Based on the Windows 3D performace I would not expect much. The advantage of ATI over the others is MPEG assisted DVD which is great with Cinemaster on Windows. I am serious ....No need to waste a PCI slot for a hardware decoder. I am excited about ATI MPEG assisted DVD for Linux work that has just started. Although the video capture for Linux is lacking (stills work) the Windows software records excellent video.
ATI's newest in the All-In-Wonder series (the 128 Pro) may be worth checking out: http://www.ati.com/n a/pages/products/pc/aiw_128_pro/index.html
Tom's Hardware has a comparison of some all-in-one cards. Each card lacks important features that another card has. No one card seems to be "feature full." I bought a Viper V770 Ultra and am waiting for the next generation of these cards to come out before I buy one.
lysdexic
"If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing."
lysdexic
"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a t
In windows-land it seems to do well also. I had to fdisk my drive and do a clean 98SE install to get the tv stuff to work, but now that it's on, it seems to work fine (I'd been meaning to do that for a while anyway). As far as tuner performance, I've got little to judge it against besides a tv. All I expected from the card was a *working* tuner that does pretty well, and I've got it. Resizes are very fast, and full-screen performance looks about as good as a regular old 17" teevee.
The final frontier (since I only use Windows nowadays to watch Jazz games) for me is to get the tuner working in Linux. I haven't even started to try to get this working, but I imagine others have gotten further than I have. I have no idea whether or not people have had any luck with this, and I'd like to know if anyone has even tried.
To answer your question, I reccommend the V3500 since most of the multimedia stuff you'll be doing is probably going to be in Windows anyway. The performance there (not that I have particularly high multimedia standards) seems to be more than adequate for me. The kicker is that the Linux support is excellent.
Monty