VOGONS


First post, by snorg

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I need a PCI graphics card to put in my Pentium Pro based system, right now there is some 2mb generic card in there.
I have a Voodoo 3000 but it would be nice to have video in/out or MPEG acceleration. Are there any PCI based boards like this?
I know Matrox had a graphics card with some sort of daughter board for MPEG and ATI probably had an AIW board, but I'm not sure what series they ran up to that would still run in a PCI slot.

Reply 1 of 6, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

You want to capture video on a Pentium Pro machine? I dunno about that idea. Disk I/O performance and CPU performance will be a problem. Some encode software really likes MMX and a PPro doesn't have it. Hardware encode acceleration will probably be necessary.

A PCI Radeon of any sort will provide good hardware MPEG 1 and 2 decode acceleration.

Matrox had a daughtercard called Rainbow Runner that did MJPEG encode, I think.

Reply 2 of 6, by snorg

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

It is more for technical demo purposes or maxing out the system rather than for practical video editing. I may go with a PCI Radeon AIW of some sort then. It would also be cool if I could switch back and forth between the Voodoo and the AIW, I think Window 98 supported multiple graphics cards but it might require a reboot, not sure you could switch on the fly like that.

Reply 4 of 6, by idspispopd

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

It is possible that a PCI Radeon won't work in your board. (I experienced that with a Radeon 7500 PCI on a Asus P55T2P4.)
ATI included full MPEG2 acceleration from Rage 128 so in case you run into problems an All-in-Wonder 128 PCI might be a solution.

Reply 6 of 6, by obobskivich

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

This from THG might be useful, I don't know how many of these cards are available for PCI though:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/multitalented,144.html

Also no idea how a Pentium Pro would fare with one of those cards and the lack of MMX ++ being older than most of those cards/GPUS/etc by a reasonable margin. Pentium Pro came out in 1995; that review is dated 1999. What you want may or may not work out very well at the end of the day - as swaaye suggests.