- Joined
- Mar 26, 2003
- Location
- North America
Several years ago while using my GF3Ti200, I decided to plug my machine into my TV and do some psuedo big-screen gaming with NFS3 and other such arcade style games. Hell, the GF3 had an SVD jack, and so does my TV, so let's just plug it all together and it will be neat right?
Boy did that ever suck. Washed out colors, picture didn't fill the screen by a large margin, any resolution over 640x480 put a portion of the desktop OFF the viewable area -- while still keeping that nice 2" black stripe down the left side. Bleh
So I eventually went out and bought an outboard video converter with it's own hardware framebuffer and svideo support. Can take resolutions up to 1280x1024 (yes yes, the TV stops at like 400x300, I know this), supports overscan so you can fill the whole TV screen, supports contrast, brightness, gamma and saturation controls so you can get the colors basically right, as well as a nice set of other things. Set me back $149 at the time, but playing on the 36" TV was better than my 15" HP monitor so I didn't care.
Fast forward to last night: was playing GTA III PC on the TV, and my converter went out Looks like it's only the powerbrick that died, as it doesn't put out any voltage anymore... So I'm thinking I'll cruise to Radio Shack, buy a universal DC adapter and go about my life. But something hits me: there's an SVIDEO jack on the back of my 9500np card that I've never even so much as blinked at before...
Plugged it in, turned it on and expected the worst. I must say I am VERY impressed! It supports resolutions of up to 1024x768 (which we all know will never happen thru an SVD jack, but still...), seems to have a good comb filter, the colors are actually saturated the way they need to be, the desktop takes up the full TV screen, and you can even READ the text on the TV at the 1024x768 resolution (can't even do that with my offboard framebuffer unit)
The ATI control panel options had a few selections that made it even better; was able to tweak the brightness just a touch and was able to adjust the sharpness of the SVIDEO signal which made a noticeable difference on the edges in GTA III.
Turned up the AF to 16x, turned the AA to 2x (it's already getting AA'd anyway, from being reduced to TV resolution from 1024x768) and went to town.
I have yet again another newfound respect for ATI For those of you who haven't tried the video output on your Radeon, you might give it a whirl... I was very impressed with mine.
Boy did that ever suck. Washed out colors, picture didn't fill the screen by a large margin, any resolution over 640x480 put a portion of the desktop OFF the viewable area -- while still keeping that nice 2" black stripe down the left side. Bleh
So I eventually went out and bought an outboard video converter with it's own hardware framebuffer and svideo support. Can take resolutions up to 1280x1024 (yes yes, the TV stops at like 400x300, I know this), supports overscan so you can fill the whole TV screen, supports contrast, brightness, gamma and saturation controls so you can get the colors basically right, as well as a nice set of other things. Set me back $149 at the time, but playing on the 36" TV was better than my 15" HP monitor so I didn't care.
Fast forward to last night: was playing GTA III PC on the TV, and my converter went out
Looks like it's only the powerbrick that died, as it doesn't put out any voltage anymore... So I'm thinking I'll cruise to Radio Shack, buy a universal DC adapter and go about my life. But something hits me: there's an SVIDEO jack on the back of my 9500np card that I've never even so much as blinked at before...Plugged it in, turned it on and expected the worst. I must say I am VERY impressed! It supports resolutions of up to 1024x768 (which we all know will never happen thru an SVD jack, but still...), seems to have a good comb filter, the colors are actually saturated the way they need to be, the desktop takes up the full TV screen, and you can even READ the text on the TV at the 1024x768 resolution (can't even do that with my offboard framebuffer unit)
The ATI control panel options had a few selections that made it even better; was able to tweak the brightness just a touch and was able to adjust the sharpness of the SVIDEO signal which made a noticeable difference on the edges in GTA III.
Turned up the AF to 16x, turned the AA to 2x (it's already getting AA'd anyway, from being reduced to TV resolution from 1024x768) and went to town.
I have yet again another newfound respect for ATI
For those of you who haven't tried the video output on your Radeon, you might give it a whirl... I was very impressed with mine.
