Tom's Hardware > Forum > Graphic & Displays > Graphics Cards > What graphic card do I need to buy? help?

What graphic card do I need to buy? help?

Forum Graphic & Displays : Graphics Cards - What graphic card do I need to buy? help?

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I generally stream baseball, football and other sports on my laptop computer. When I try to view in full screen the picture is grainy. Can I buy a graphic card that will resolve this issue? and if so can I hook up my computer to my plasma tv and be able to view the games in a good quality picture?

Thanks,
jaime

Toshiba Satellite M55-s1001

specs:

* The Satellite A105-S1001 includes: 14"-diagonal widescreen WXGA (1280 x 768) TruBrite LCD screen
* Intel Celeron M processor 380 operating at 1.6GHz
* 1MB L2 cache
* 400MHz frontside bus
* 256MB of PC2-4200 DDR2 SDRAM, upgradeable to 2.0GB
* 60GB 5400-rpm EIDE hard drive
* DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive — play DVDs, burn and play CDs
* Toshiba Express Media Player — lets you play DVDs and CDs without booting
* Atheros 802.11b/g wireless LAN
* 10/100Base-TX Ethernet port
* 56K V.92 software modem
* 3 USB 2.0 ports
* 1 S-video out port
* PC Card slot: supports 1 PC Card Type II, PCMCIA R2.01, PC Card16, CardBus
* ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics with 32MB to 64MB of shared memory (dynamically allocated)
* Realtek ALC250 16-bit stereo sound with built-in stereo speakers; headphone output and microphone input; volume control dial
* SRS Labs TruSurround XT surround sound; SRS WOW stereo enhancement

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The grainy picture isn't going to be resolved by upgrading your graphics card. Streams will always look sloppy.

Reply to skolpo

Video quality is determined by the source. Since the source is the streaming videos and have been encoded rather poorly, then there is nothing you can do to "fix" it.

The only solution is for the media companies to re-encode their streaming videos to higher bit rates which means downloads will take longer due to larger file sizes and you might get stuttering videos if your bandwidth gets maxed out.

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Reply to jaguarskx

The limiting factor isnt on your end, they compress the streams to reduce their total bandwidth usage, at best they are 800x600 which when expanded to even 1024x768 will not look good, expanding it to the size of a plasma screen tv and the pixels that were transmitted each get expanded to 1/4" squares. If you want good picture quality you are going to have to go for cable.

Reply to hunter315

Thanks, did not know that; I guess I'll have to continue watching as I have for now. Thanks again.

Reply to jgar200
Tom's Hardware > Forum > Graphic & Displays > Graphics Cards > What graphic card do I need to buy? help?
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