geforce 2 ultra or geforce 3

[Guest]

i found the elsa gladiac ultra for 265$ inclu S&h
and the gladiac 920 for 360$ ..
is it really worth it to buy the 920 ,i don't really spend
much time playing games on the computer ,and thought that the ultra is an excellent deal..
can someone help me decide

 

[noko]

Why would you buy either card if you don't play games. Do you do any 3d work besides 2d work? Now if you have family members who play games I can maybe understand in buying a top of the line game card. If you want great 2d, cool video stuff and good 3d game card maybe a much cheaper Radeon would work just fine. A Geforce 2 Pro is less then $200 now days also. In fact if you do just 2d and rarely if ever play games then a Matrox may even be better for you with its superior 2d quality. Let us know. Kyro2 may also fit the bill but I would wait until the actual card ships and people have a say on it.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 05/01/01 09:28 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

Moko is right, if you do not play games, why should you buy either of them. You can find very good deals on GF2 32MB, Radion or even the new Kyro 2. Any one of them should make you spend less than US$ 200 incl. S&H.

 

[Guest]

actually i do spend some time playing games but not much
since my card isn't good anymore (cl riva tnt2 ultra) and i
watch dvd's a lot on the computer (platinum 5.1 with 5.1 setup and 19 ") and as i've seen on elsa's website
the gf2ultra has hdtv quality for dvd playback?
i can also use the vivo module to do some editing ...
and since the performance of the gf2 ultra is much better than the tnt2 ultra i might start spending some more time playing games

 

[Guest]

"the gf2ultra has hdtv quality for dvd playback?"

I seriously doubt this... You can't get any better quality then the source itself, meaning that it won't be any better quality then on an ordinary TV set. None HDTV that is..

AMD TBIRD 1.33
Asus A7M266
Vapochill
nVida Geoforce3
Apacer 256MB DDR266
Seagate X15

 

[Guest]

Hercules Prophet GF2 Ultra will offer you very good DVD playback and I believe it has video-out to be connected to TV. I miss that on my GF2 Ultra.

Sinece, I read that you do play games but not so much, still go with my previous suggestion to save you money.

 

[Guest]

Radeon's offer much better DVD features and since they give very good (though not as good as the GeForce 2 Ultra) performance in games and are very resonably priced... you should carefully consider a Radeon.

Regards,
Warden

 

[Guest]

HDTV- und DVD-Playback Extended motion compensation for full screen video playback in all DVD and
HDTV resolutions, video acceleration for MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and Indeo got to:
http://www.elsa.com/international/europe/produkte/grafikkarten/gladiacultra.htm
from asustek's website:
High Quality Video Playback

DVD Acceleration
Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution
Full precision subpixel accuracy to 1/16 pixel
Video Overlay
5 horizontal, 3 vertical taps
8:1 up/down scaling
Independent hue, saturation and brightness controls in hardware
check :
http://www.asus.com/products/Addon/Vga/agpv7700d/feature.html

 

[noko]

Radeon Video capabilities:

<b>HDTV</b>

. . Fully supports all aspects of the HDTV video format, accommodates the widest
. . format <b>1920 pixels wide</b>. Competing products are forced to downscale the
. . video image resulting in a loss of quality.

<b>DVD</b>

. . Hardware acceleration of motion compensation, run-level decode, de-zigzag,
. . IDCT and subpicture, as well as scaling, alpha blending and color-space
. . conversion. Significantly improving system performance and image qualtiy.

. . IDCT (only in ATI chips) cuts the cpu usage in half from a purely Motion
. . compensation assist card. For example, software only 65% cpu usage,
. . Motion compensation on hardware 40% cpu usage, Motion compensation
. . and IDCT 20% usage. Doing a virus scan, defragmenting hard drives,
. . downloading while a DVD playing is not a problem with a Radeon equiped system.

. . Quality is compromised when the Motion Compensating chips does the IDCT
. . part by software truncating a 9 bit error term to 8 bits dropping information for
. . color space conversion, scaling or de-interlacing. The Radeon uses all the
. . 9 bit data for error corrections and does the IDCT in hardware.

. . Top quality 4x4-tap filtered vertical and horizontal scaler allowing a 64:1
. . (Not a limited 8:1) upscaling and downscaling. At lower downscaling ratios
. . the Radeo increases to 8-tap horizontal to preserve detail. No undesirable
. . ringing artifacts on a Radeon video image when scaling unlike others.

. . <b>Adaptive <b>Per-Pixel</b> De-Interlacing</b> Frankly an Awesome feature. No one
. . else has this in their video chips except ATI. High quality between still and
. . the motion part of a image where both will be clear vice one being blurred by
. . either bob or weave de-interlacing techniques. If you want jaw dropping
. . DVD playback this is it. This feature is not limited to DVD but is used
. . also in any video signal sent to the Radeon. I gave away my TV set
. . because my Radeon video quality blew it away to be up front.

<b>Video</b>

. . 8-Bit Alpaha Blending of Video and graphics.
. . Adaptive de-interlacing
. . Video out up to 800x600
. . SVHS and composite output
. . Composite/SVHS input on Radeon AIW composite only on Radeon 64 and
. . . other OEM models.
. . Hardware-accelerated control of brightness, contrast, hue and saturation
. . . controls can be adjusted by exploiting fully programmable matrix multiplier
. . . supporting 30 bits per pixel.
. . Genlock ability built in
. . Video Overlay
. . Video capture in Mpeg2, Mpeg and AVI files.

Other features such as built in TV turner on the AIW is also available. Software for all the above capability except for the Genlock ability comes with the Radeons. Drivers now support all features pretty much flawlessly.

 

[arsend]

Notice that the word TO is used when disscribing "Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution" DVD players, and DVD discs do not support this format, as they only have 500- 700 lines of resolution, so although the card supports this feature, you will not be able to use it since the DVDs don't have it. Only HD Digital TV has those speck, and to enjoy it, you have to have a HD DTV tuner to pick them up. I here that ATI in one of their articles say that the Radon is HD TV Ready, but you still need the tuner and software to use this feature.

If it works for you then don't fix it.

 

[Guest]

Since you don't play many games I would suggest the Radeon series. As the other guys have posted it has great 2D and DVD playback, and good 3D gaming, and the price is much less than the GeForce2 cards.



If it works...keep the users off of it!