Can you tell us more about this game> It looks quite modern.

S-Video capture is ok, but has limitations. What machine are you using, you could just use Bandicam or other software capture solutions.

With the Radeon 9200, what is the issue with the game? Compatibility? Performance?

Nitronic Rush is ~2012 and needs DX9.0c and PixelShader-something. The website 'recommends' 512MB but I've run it on an old Dell laptop with an NVidia Quadro w/256MB and it did ok. It doesn't run on the Radeon (shows a blank white screen) but *does* run with the SwiftShader 3.0 software renderer installed, just too slowly to play.

Edit: also, I'm not doing captures, I have the PC hooked up to a big SD CRT TV in my 'console cabinet' 😀

Double edit: guess machine specs would help. P4 3.0 (800FSB) on Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G w/4GB running XP. I also have a Dual-P4 2.4 on a 533FSB board lying around if you guys think that would be better. (I realize I'm not going to run NR at full framerate in high-res on this machine but based on my experience with the slug Dell Latitude I think it would at least work.)

Ok that clears it up.

Radeon 9700 / GeForce FX should have S-Video out and more performance than the 9200.

Radeon x1xxx's will support 9.0c and are commonly available in AGP. The x1650 Pro in my DirectX 9 machine has an s-video out and so should many others. You could also go for an AGP HD Radeon, like an HD4650, but those seem to be a bit more rare. I can only speak to ATi/AMD cards at this level. I'm sure others will have info on nVidia cards.

oh don't even suggest those pcie->agp bridge hdradeons 🙁 even if they might be more bulletproof for modern games in theory. They're sometimes slower than the later pre-HD radeons, and most are only VGA and DVI out.

The last (and fastest) unbridged AGP Radeon is R481 (X850XT, X850XT PE).
And as I can see from my ASUS AX850XTP/HTVD - there is S-Video+composite output and input (or it can be replaced by the RGsB(?) one).
There are 2 troubles. These cards are a) have the infamous "leadless" soldering (an owen is your best friend) and b) rare (10 years old).

P.S. Didn't seen the PS 3.0 requirement. There is no unbridged Radeons with the PS 3.0 support.

He also mentioned that the game needs DX 9.0c, which rules out R3xx and R4xx based cards.

OP, there isn't really anything that completely fits your requirements. For NVidia you could try some sort of GF6800, but the only ones that came with 512MB were some rare Ultra variants. There's always a 7800GS, but those command a price premium. On the ATI side various manufacturers stuck chips behind AGP bridges all the way up to the HD4670, but the drivers for those are hit-or-miss.

Your best bet might be hunting around for an old 775 or 939 board with PCIe. They're generally at the point now where people are just throwing them out or recycling them, and if you ask around you could probably find someone with an old Pentium D or Athlon 64 sitting in a closet. Otherwise start cruising alleys, watching Craigslist, and try to get friendly with your local recycling center.

I'd ditch the whole idea and just go with a VGA to S-Video converter 😀

Geforce 6600 maybe?

Thanks for the input all!
What's wrong with the 'bridged' Radeons? I get they would be slow compared to the PCI-e versions but I'd be upgrading from an even older card... Are they gonna be worse than my 9200? Or is it more stability/compatibility issues?

If the right mobo pops up I'm not averse to upgrading to a PCI-e setup but nothing decent is being advertised locally. I built this whole machine for free from stuff being thrown away, so I don't wanna blow the budget on it.

@Phil - I've tried those cheap Ebay scan converters and the quality was awful; horrendous color bleed and desaturation. I'm not expecting miracles from S-Video but I know what it's supposed to look like and that wasn't it. 😀 I don't have the cash for a more upmarket one at the moment.

The bridge essentially just bottlenecks the performance of a card that would otherwise be faster on a pure PCIe interface. Despite this, any of those cards will still be faster than your 9200. I have one of those too and I know how it performs.

There's 3 or 4 Radeon x1650Pro's with 512MB of vram on ebay right now for about $40. They're not rare.

You could also go through wikipedia's list of amd units and find one that fits your needs. The list includes which versions of DirectX and OpenGL they support. I'm sure there's an equivalent list for nVidia boards.

xjas wrote:

@Phil - I've tried those cheap Ebay scan converters and the quality was awful; horrendous color bleed and desaturation. I'm not expecting miracles from S-Video but I know what it's supposed to look like and that wasn't it. 😀 I don't have the cash for a more upmarket one at the moment.

A bit of a blast from the past, when I started my YouTube channel, I was using S-Video captures, either directly from GeForce cards, or via a cheap VGA to S-Video converter from eBay. Sure, directly was a tiny bit improved, but it was very hard to notice. I remember the settings I used to change was lower the brightness to have proper blacks and saturate the colours a little bit.

A couple months ago I connected an AGP 7600GS 256MB card to a TV using SVideo. It worked, showing the BIOS boot screens and all. I don't think I had any functional problems with SVideo. I had problems with component, which is what I was trying to use. It seemed impossible to output low resolutions with component, but SVideo was able to run at 320x240.

For a moment, I had gotten component to output a 640x480 480i signal to the SDTV which it was able to display. That was the furthest I got with it. However, it was easy to mess this up when I fiddled with things further. I kept ending up in a situation where I needed a computer monitor to see the screen and fix something. SVideo was easier to deal with. NVidia's drivers seem to assume that Component is for an HDTV and SVideo is for an SDTV. I think SVideo always output a usable signal to the TV - I don't think it will even allow you to output a signal on SVideo that an SDTV can't handle.

Bottom line, SVideo seems to work fine with these cards. Component to an SDTV is frustrating.

I had an issue with brightly glowing horizontal lines on the TV. It happened on lines where there was text, or where the white mouse pointer appeared. It was worst with component, but the effect was blurred out some with SVideo. It was noticeable on the GUI desktop, but I don't think I saw it in the NES emulator. I didn't try any modern 3D-era games on it. The issue might have only been at 640x480 and not at 320x240, but I don't remember for sure.

The card I tried above was a 7600GS 256MB AGP. I don't know how it would perform in your target application though, and the RAM is smaller than you're looking for. I think many of the 7800GS cards have 512MB and would be faster, but those cards are usually expensive. They also don't have the best reliability record so you'd need to be careful about not ending up with a bad card.
All the 7000-series NVidias are bridged Express->AGP cards. I don't know if it really matters, I think such cards were tested to work with later era AGP motherboards like you have.

The ATI cards mentioned earlier might be better, I have no idea about that. ATI was usually better than NVidia with home theater type stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if their TV-out support/quality is better.

3dfx's TV out is my personal favorite for the sharp 720x480 output suitable for cheap "vga capture" (but not for playing on TVs as overscan is an issue then), but that's of course out of your criteria. I would mark Radeon as a favorite if it could do that.

xjas wrote:

Thanks for the input all!
What's wrong with the 'bridged' Radeons? I get they would be slow compared to the PCI-e versions but I'd be upgrading from an even older card... Are they gonna be worse than my 9200? Or is it more stability/compatibility issues?

Stability and compatibility, definitely. I remember the drivers for the bridge chip being a bitch and a half to get working.

They might be slightly slower than comparable PCIe cards, but if it's in a system that still has AGP in the first place chances are your bottleneck will be somewhere else.

ATI cards need a separate driver for their bridged AGP cards (the "AGP hotfix" driver). Users reported compatibility and stability issues.
Nvidia was a lot better with those, with the bridged GeForce 6600/7x00 cards using the same drivers as their PCIe variant. I think 6800 are native AGP.

That being said, I have a 1GB HD 4650 and I did not have much trouble with it with the latest AGP hotfix driver. Just downloaded, double clicked the EXE and let it do its job. Mind that I don't use that PC very often, and I have not played many games on that machine.

You can always build a VGA to SCART adapter-cable. Did that back in the days, gave really good picture on the TV with a little tuning with Powerstrip.

Guide: http://www.idiots.org.uk/vga_rgb_scart/
Swedish version, simplified so that a CAT 5 cable can be used: http://www.nada.kth.se/~feldt/vgascart/

Note, only for Radeon-cards. I used this cable for Radeon 9x00 series.

Unfortunately I'm in NTSC-land so no SCART.

My TV does have component (YUV) inputs, could I just use a cheap 'dumb' VGA->component cable like this one and set the refresh with Powerstrip? Does it let you change the settings in firmware for BIOS / text modes or only for the desktop?

VGA uses an RGB signal, not component. A simple cable like that won't work unless the video card has some capability to output component through the VGA port. I've heard that some ATI cards do work that way, but I don't know the details. It's not a standard thing that VGA would normally provide.