[mythtv-users] Video Card Recommendation

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Mon Aug 11 20:34:09 UTC 2008


Brian C. Huffman wrote:

> 
> Well, perhaps I'm not tweaking the driver properly, but last night I was trying to watch the Olympics while recording (normal behavior for myth when watching liveTV) in HD and it was choppy.  Now I'll agree that could be other things.
> 
> But even watching SD content from Dish Network resulted in "tearing" (guess that's what it's called)" in high motion scenes.  I *never* saw that with my old system which was extremely under-powered: (first gen 2.0GHz single core, not even HT on a 450MHz bus and Nvidia 5200).
> 
> In general I've come to feel that the best support seems to be on the Nvidia cards.

My understanding is that the nVidia 5200 is the gold standard of Myth
performance. A more "up to date" card is used only because a PCI-express
version of the 5200 is very rare (I think they were called 5300s) and in
an effort to avoid having to use the legacy versions of the nVidia drivers.

In fact, the 5xxx cards used chroma key while the newer cards use
overlays, so it could be argued that the 5200 is actually better than
the newer cards.

Anything 8xxx or newer will not support XvMC.

So a 5xxx series card would actually be best for Myth, newer cards are
used because they might be cheaper or easier to find.

As I said, this is my belief, if I'm wrong I'd appreciate somebody
setting me straight :-)

beww


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