Posted by LuSiD on 17, 2000 at 5:50 AM:
In Reply to: Re: What Video card to use for both TV out and PC Monitor (more)? posted by Bart on 16, 2000 at 3:45 PM:
I haven't tried any of the Gforce cards. If I get my hands on one I'll drop it in and put it through it's paces.
In my case, 3D performance was a secondary consideration. TV out quality was my primary concern. In your case, maybe you should invest in a big computer monitor.
Most cards work fine as long as you only run windows apps. Some only support 640x480, some will accept 800x600. It's when you start feeding them oddball DOS resolutions that they start showing their true colors. The ATI cards will take whatever resolution you throw at them and just scale it to fit the tv screen.
: 1) Does any body have any experiance with the *external* converters? This is looking more and more the way to go (in my case), but they appear to be limited in the graphic modes that they will accept.
I've tried 2 and they both looked horrible. That was well over a year ago, so I can't cite models. And that was just in windows trying to dump powerpoint stuff to a tv from a laptop.
: 2) Does the TV out on "any" card work with DOS as long as it it run on top of Windows? I can live with the performace hit that I will get running this way.
That varies from card to card. For example, with the G400 a full screen dos box disables tv out unles you flash the bios with a matrox utility to enable dos tv out support.
With the Voodoo3, DOS & full screen dos boxes may or may not display in color depending on your tv. And the lower MAME resolutions don't work properly. the workaround is to run everything in 800x600, but many games won't be full screen and you get a performance hit doing it that way.
As for running dos apps in windowed mode, I didn't try that. But like Tom said, some just wont run windowed.
: : The only good choice is the ATI cards. I have tried TNT cards, Voodo cards, and today spent quite a bit of time wrestling with the G400, and the ATI has by far the best TV out of any of them. Go for the Rage Fury Pro 32 meg, or if you can't find one of those get a Rage Fury 32 meg. The G400 could work, but it was way more of a hassle to get set up, and the TV out on this card stopped working in MAME before Genom & I could get the TV calibrated to it properly. The other cards have serious problems with TV out in DOS mode so don't even bother.