graphic card and pre-rendered images

[girlrebel]

Hello!
Forgive me for being something of a hardware idiot. I have this burning question I have to ask. Does the graphic card affect the quality of pre-rendered iamges?
You see, I was playing the cinematics of warcraft III on my old voodoo4 (or was it 4.5?) card, then I switched over the my new geforce4mx card - just to see the difference. The cinematics looked better on the new card - it seemed clearer - the images looked sharper and was (obviously) less jerky. But my peers are convinced my response was psychological, and that graphic cards have no effect whatsoever on pre-rendered images.
So right now I'm confused. I've tried looking for the info on websites but all I've got are reviews on games and then some. I would so so appreciate it if some intellectual who knows what s/he's talking about can answer this question for me.
I just have to know how this works. Thanks in advance!

 

[cakecake]

The RAMDACs on older cards are not as high quality in isolating the signal to the monitor and/or producing a quality signal.

The video playback quality and speed can be affected. The movies in Warcraft III are encoded in Divx, which is a lot more hardware intensive than Mpeg-1 or Mpeg-2. Most likely the playback on your old Voodoo card was jerky because it had an older video chip. Someone correct me on this if I'm wrong.

This little cathode light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine!

 

[UoMDeacon]

DiVX playback should only be affected by the CPU of your system, as there are no vid-card enhancements written into the codec... Not sure why the video would appear smoother, unless the card is having problems refreshing at that resolution. I notice that playback is back on my old S3 Trio64V+ card as well for all types of movie files.

 

[cakecake]

Yep, there is something other than CPU speed that is affecting it. My old card stuttered in video playback but when I put in a new card it's smooth now.

This little cathode light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine!

 

[Myrmecophagavir]

Maybe video overlay compatibility. New methods for playing back video files (ie. Direct Show) may not be properly supported on old cards with old drivers.

2D image quality can certainly be better, the colours may appear more vibrant (as the buzzword seems to be) and the image could well be a bit sharper.