That is my gut feeling as well. Although this is not good empirical evidence, the 5950 works just fine with drivers for the original 5900.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-06-19, 14:50:

Video processing has always been a budget feature that was removed from higher end products, as speculated for higher clocks. I suspect that it still made it into the FX 5700 because it was also used in the Personal Cinema product line.

Notebooks man. Having full MPEG2 decode helps win battery life tests and OEMs loved that.

On the desktop who cares. A P3 or classic Athlon has no problem with DVD decoding and nobody cared about power consumption back then. Quality is determined by the software and might be better than hardware.

However, GeForce 256 through GF4 Ti do have partial MPEG2 offload. They have motion compensation, scaling and color-space conversion. PowerDVD and WinDVD should use it. It's iDCT offload that they didn't implement until they were going into notebooks in a big way with GF4 MX.

What API is used for this kind of hardware accelerated decoding or partial offload? Is it automatic when calling the appropriate Win32 multimedia APIs or does it require some vendor specific library?

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-06-22, 21:25:

What API is used for this kind of hardware accelerated decoding or partial offload? Is it automatic when calling the appropriate Win32 multimedia APIs or does it require some vendor specific library?

I'm not sure but it might just be DXVA. ATi Rage Pro used DXVA for DVD acceleration and it had a similar level of features as a GeForce 256 for it. Rage 128 onward include iDCT processing so are at the level of GF4MX.

Rage Pro info
https://web.archive.org/web/20060427060938/ww … hosein/rpro.htm

AlexZ wrote on 2022-06-17, 19:47:

There are definitely some issues with 5x.xx drivers. Re: HELP! - GeForce FX5600 in win98se […]
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Kahenraz wrote on 2022-06-14, 02:40:

I've heard a lot of people talk about driver version 45.23 being the "most compatible". I've had good results testing up through 56.64, and haven't seen any use case where the 45.23 had any advantage, compatibility or otherwise.

There are definitely some issues with 5x.xx drivers. Re: HELP! - GeForce FX5600 in win98se

I got error "direct 3d device does not accurately report texture memory usage" with 53.04/56.64 driver when starting first mission in Thief 2. With 45.23 driver it works fine. I would highly recommend to everyone to use 45.23 and not waste time with experiments. 5x.xx is only a necessity for FX 5700 which makes it less desirable then the rest of FX line.

I used 53.04 for some time and it did seem to have good compatibility. But it isn't as good as 45.23.

Sorry to bump an older post but the fix for Thief 2 with Nvidia forceware 5x.xx drivers is to uncomment ";safe_texture_manager" in the C:\games\Thief2\User.cfg. Thief 1 also has this issue with some cards and drivers. I'm running a PNY fx5700ve 256mb with dx9c on driver 56.64. Absolutely no issues so far with any game I have tested. Nglide is also working without issues. Here is a link to some patches and useful information about Theif 1 and 2 http://www.thief-thecircle.com/media/patches/

The earliest driver that I was able to run on a GeForce FX 5800 Ultra and run 3D games is Detonator 40.52. However, ForceWare 2.0 (56.56) turned out to be the fastest and least problematic driver of all.