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PowerDVD and old ATi Rage cards

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First post, by 386SX

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Hello,

I think to remember that the old PowerDVD sw players had problems with the ATI Rage Pro HW acceleration and there was some patch to apply. For what I've tested the old PowerDVD seems to not detect the hw acceleration of the PCI Rage Pro chips (but also the AGP version) while WinDVD can enable it but with mostly no difference in cpu usage. From what I've read only the AGP version of the Rage Pro when released was mentioning the DVD acceleration (Motion Compensation) and it looks like the PCI version while supporting it might not benefit from it really. Do anyone remembers something more about it and the PCI version of this chip?

Thanks

Reply 1 of 4, by Meatball

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Perhaps not definitive, but the box I have of the PCI version of the Rage Pro 3D (Xpert98@Play) mentions full motion video and "scaling" to achieve DVD like quality. A search for AGP boxes has the same wording, but there's an offer for DVD playback software included with the AGP version, which is not present with the PCI version.

Moving up the Xpert128 and the rest of the 128 line of the boxes I have, the wording changes to onboard hardware DVD playback (even for the PCI version).

Reply 2 of 4, by 386SX

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Meatball wrote on 2022-03-07, 17:27:

Perhaps not definitive, but the box I have of the PCI version of the Rage Pro 3D (Xpert98@Play) mentions full motion video and "scaling" to achieve DVD like quality. A search for AGP boxes has the same wording, but there's an offer for DVD playback software included with the AGP version, which is not present with the PCI version.

Moving up the Xpert128 and the rest of the 128 line of the boxes I have, the wording changes to onboard hardware DVD playback (even for the PCI version).

So it's true that the PCI version was missing something and it'd be interesting to know if that player (which player was the AGP one? I suppose the ATi/Cinemaster player? Which version was it?) works also in the PCI version with similar speed results.

Reply 4 of 4, by 386SX

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Thanks, all things seems to confirm that the AGP version was somehow required. I begin to wonder if the Rage Pro PCI chip in the old package variant was the same core or a bit different or maybe the PCI bus was a serious limitation for the acceptable AGP speed version that at least was similar to the known alternative cards. Most software doesn't seem to detect any hardware acceleration for Motion Compensation and even where you can enable hw acceleration it's not really sure if it's used or not. CPU usage seems mostly around the full percentage so I suppose it's not used or not working as expected in the various softwares.

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