X800xl

Hi

I have the above X800XL 256mb card.

And i downloaded the Step Into Liquid 1080 Benchmark movie (win HD format) however, unlike the Nvidia cards i have had previous, the ATi X800XL didnt seem to take any strain from the benchmark. It seemed that the cpu had to do all the work, i.e. it was 90+ % used continuously whilst i played back the movie.

Shouldn't the graphics card help decode the video?

Or is this only the NVidia 'Purevideo' thing, and that ATi leaves all the video etc to the cpu?

I am using Cats 5.10

Thanks

Ian

No-one can help little old me?

Ian

Depends if your card has a theatre chip on it I think. Mosts VIVO cards do.

There's generally two types of graphics cards in this respect - ones that are designed just to accelerate things like 3d graphics, and ones that are designed to accelerate video/record tv etc as well as 3d graphics.

Ones that are designed for the latter (All in Wonder, AVIVO, purevideo) will accelerate your video if they can do the codec, but the former won't. Some third party manufacturers add this ability onto the base specification from NVida and ATI, so some cards might do it when they still look like they're 3d only accelerator types, but you can't assume all do.

In general all of the cards from the geforce6 series do purevideo,
see http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2305

Unfortunately, only the AIW and (A)VIVO cards from ATI, currently do however.

mine is a Vivo card, it has the theartre chip on it.

tho i am unsure as to how to capture video using it, with the cables provided :s

ah ok, so the graphics cards dont necessarily have to help display video etc, when playback of different videos, i.e. windows hd ?

thanks

but how do i capture video? with the x800xl, mine is the powercolor one

cheers

ian