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Best GPU with S-Video out

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First post, by data9791

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I'm planning on building a console emulation box for a very nice vintage Trinitron TV I bought that has S-Video input. Can anyone help me choose the most powerful and modern GPU with S-Video out that there is? I'd like to try to emulate up to the PS2/Gamecube era at factory resolutions. I considered using a Pi, but from what I have read they still don't have the muscle for decent PS2 emulation. I am also planning on building an identical system for a homemade MAME cabinet that will use a Trinitron CRT as well. I am aware of digital to analog converters but I'd prefer to go straight out of the S-Video because I have heard there are latency and artifact issues. After half an hour of research the best I can find is the HD 4890. Is there anything better out there I am missing?

Reply 2 of 26, by data9791

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I'm not a hardware expert in the least so forgive me if this is a stupid question; I understand VGA is analog and DVI-I has analog as well as digital, but is there latency when converting it to S-video? I understand there is enough to be noticeable with HDMI to S-video.

Reply 3 of 26, by derSammler

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External converters always introduce latency, since a framebuffer is required. The cheaper they are, the higher the latency is. One frame latency is minimum (17ms for NTSC, 20ms for PAL) and can not be avoided. So you are better off using a video card that has s-video out.

Keep in mind that a TV does a lot of internal processing as well, causing additional latency. Make sure it has a game mode if you don't want too many latencies adding up.

Anyway, what are the system specs you are aiming for? The "best GPU" depends on that.

Reply 4 of 26, by agent_x007

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I think HD 3870 are last with VIVO on ATI/AMD side (not sure about partner cards, since those can have it by changing PCB).
On NV side, GTX 285 are last ones with VIVO (again, reference designs).

You can buy passive adapter to S-Video from VIVO here (NV) : LINK

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Reply 5 of 26, by data9791

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derSammler wrote:

Anyway, what are the system specs you are aiming for? The "best GPU" depends on that.

Well, I was just going to try to build the best system I could around the best video card I could get that had S-Video. So far the HD4890 is the best single GPU option that I can find. So I what ever CPU matches the best with whatever I find. I want to base the system around a very stripped down Win7. The 4870x2 is technically more powerful and has s-video but they cost a fortune, run hot, use a ton of power and I don't want to deal with the Crossfire bullshit. Nvidia doesn't seem to have an option as powerful.

Reply 6 of 26, by Scali

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derSammler wrote:

External converters always introduce latency, since a framebuffer is required.

The internal ones are no different. You always need a buffer, because the VGA signal needs to be converted to NTSC or PAL standard, which means changing framerate, making it interlaced, and generally also rescaling.
There are simple cheap chips that perform this action. For that reason they became standard on videocards somewhere in the late 90s, and disappeared again once digital TV became standard.
You can still buy the external ones, which work on any video card with VGA, such as the Koenig CMP-Telview that I have used myself:
https://www.konigelectronic.com/computer/vide … onverter-785411
cmp-telview1_mr_1_.jpg

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 7 of 26, by Badscrew

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I have a Nvidia GeForce 4 440MX that has S-Video and TV outs. Should be plenty enough for 90's arcades and console emulation I think.

Last edited by Badscrew on 2019-10-13, 12:28. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 8 of 26, by BinaryDemon

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Is your system going to be beefy enough for GameCube emulation? I don’t have any experience with it but I’ve read that the recommended specs for Dolphin emulator is something like a 64bit OS and a DX11 videocard. Obviously getting by with less is possible since people are running it on things like Raspberry PI.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 9 of 26, by data9791

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BinaryDemon wrote:

Is your system going to be beefy enough for GameCube emulation? I don’t have any experience with it but I’ve read that the recommended specs for Dolphin emulator is something like a 64bit OS and a DX11 videocard. Obviously getting by with less is possible since people are running it on things like Raspberry PI.

I believe Dolphin supports DX10 cards but recommends DX11. That's why I am thinking the HD4890 is my best shot since it's the most modern/powerful S-Video card I can find that at least supports DX10. PSXC2 also has DX10 plugins. I've seen the HD4890 running games for both emulators well at native resolutions. But I'd still like something more powerful and modern if someone can recommend another solution that will minimize the latency as crispy gamepad/joystick input will be a must for this build.

Reply 10 of 26, by Scali

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data9791 wrote:

I believe Dolphin supports DX10 cards but recommends DX11.

That shouldn't matter. Any card that supports DX10, will support DX11. DX11 is backward compatible with DX11 and DX9 hardware and drivers to a certain extent. You just need to have the DX11 runtime installed (which is standard on Win7 and higher, and requires the Platform Update on Vista).

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 11 of 26, by SPBHM

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I think many or most HD 4000 Radeons had the S-Video-composite-component out, my HD 4670 sure has it and I saw a 4850 recently with it,
but the last time I used it was with the 9500PRO and it worked nicely.

I used component on the HD 3850 also and it was fine.

Reply 12 of 26, by Doornkaat

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Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, I'm in no way an emulator expert but afaik emulators hardly use any GPU capabilities other than displaying an image. Emulation is done mostly (if not completely) in CPU.
If this holds true it'd be wise to choose your GPU around analog output quality.
Also isn't the DAC for TV output integrated into the GPU on late 2000s cards? Again: serious question, not an expert.

Reply 13 of 26, by Scali

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Doornkaat wrote:

Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, I'm in no way an emulator expert but afaik emulators hardly use any GPU capabilities other than displaying an image. Emulation is done mostly (if not completely) in CPU.

That depends somewhat on the machine being emulated.
With 8-bit and early 16-bit systems this is generally true.
With later systems, which have their own 3D acceleration, this is not usually true. Like Glide-wrappers, the emulators try to translate the native 3D drawing commands to Direct3D or OpenGL.

Even so, they indeed generally do not use a lot of the functionality of the GPU, since the emulated systems tend to have far more limited hardware than what DX10/DX11 have to offer.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 14 of 26, by bakemono

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Hopefully you end up with a card that can do unscaled TV out. My old FX5200 could do a 720x480 mode (including overscan) which was ideal for stuff like watching DVDs on a big CRT at the time. I think you'd want something like that for emulating consoles that ran at 480i. When I upgraded to a newer video card I found that its TV-out could only do 640x480 or 800x600 scaled down to the visible area, so I didn't bother with it anymore.

Reply 15 of 26, by SPBHM

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the graphics driver can be very important for good emulation
I've tried a lot of solutions for GMA 950, and even emulating SNES can be tricky, a lot of combinations (OS/driver/emulator) will fail to have consistent performance (at times it will fail, stutter or have broken vsync), and compatibility is terrible since it's OGL 1.4 and poor "DX9" is what you get.

with the HD 4670 I mentioned, it's also problematic with newer emulators with OGL 3.3, for example out of the box it fails to run the Retroarch n64 emulator (muppen64 core I think) even if it theoretically it supports OGL 3.3,

oh and even with the HD 5850 in DX11 for example I got much lower than expected performance on PCSX2 compared to the HD 7850 using the same PC and software (apart from driver version which was much newer with the 7850 because they dropped support for the other in 2015).

not to mention PCSX2 and the newer emulators under OpenGL where you really want an Nvidia card,

also if you use an older card you are missing on Vulkan which is being adopted by some emulators.

and just in terms of raw performance, some emulators can be intensive if you run at a much higher resolution.

but I've actually been thinking about pairing my 4670 with an old CRT TV for mostly 16bit consoles emulation, maybe I would also like to try up to Dreamcast, but I'm not sure how well Redream would work, it requiring OGL 3.3 is not a good sign.

Reply 16 of 26, by FAMICOMASTER

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Dolphin requires a good amount of strength behind your machine to emulate at a decent speed, let alone with any kind of quality in rendering.

Last I heard, PS2 emulators barely ran at all, so I doubt you could get it to work well on anything small.

I think your best bet for using a CRT would be to just go out and get a VGA monitor and use something like an R7 250X which has a VGA output already on it. The resolution won't matter too much, since for the most part GameCube and PS2 games were never in very high resolutions (Almost always games were programmed for NTSC / PAL television, in very few cases do they support even component HD).

Reply 17 of 26, by rishooty

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bakemono wrote on 2019-10-14, 13:24:

Hopefully you end up with a card that can do unscaled TV out. My old FX5200 could do a 720x480 mode (including overscan) which was ideal for stuff like watching DVDs on a big CRT at the time. I think you'd want something like that for emulating consoles that ran at 480i. When I upgraded to a newer video card I found that its TV-out could only do 640x480 or 800x600 scaled down to the visible area, so I didn't bother with it anymore.

Hate to necro, but do you or anyone else know what the last cards that could do this was?

I myself remember using the vivo ports on my geforce 8600 and later 9800 during the late xp/vista era, and yeah it did this janky thing where it scaled the visible area no matter what resolution you set it to, setting it to 640x480 just minimized the jank.

I'm just wondering what the most powerful card I could get, while outputting *unscaled* 480i is? AMD or Nvidia, no preference there.

Reply 18 of 26, by pentiumspeed

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FAMICOMASTER wrote on 2019-10-15, 21:56:

Dolphin requires a good amount of strength behind your machine to emulate at a decent speed, let alone with any kind of quality in rendering.

Last I heard, PS2 emulators barely ran at all, so I doubt you could get it to work well on anything small.

I think your best bet for using a CRT would be to just go out and get a VGA monitor and use something like an R7 250X which has a VGA output already on it. The resolution won't matter too much, since for the most part GameCube and PS2 games were never in very high resolutions (Almost always games were programmed for NTSC / PAL television, in very few cases do they support even component HD).

Now you mention the Dolphin, developers released new one and even this requires Series S or Series X to run properly and needing so much power in GPU and processor turns me off as the idea of emulating since, without needing to buy so many dying older consoles. That's lot of space to take up which I have need to rebuild, repair and test. Whole thing about emulating is to get anyone interested to play old games with their computer that aren't high end, mostly low to mid end.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 19 of 26, by rishooty

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pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-01-25, 21:27:
FAMICOMASTER wrote on 2019-10-15, 21:56:

Dolphin requires a good amount of strength behind your machine to emulate at a decent speed, let alone with any kind of quality in rendering.

Last I heard, PS2 emulators barely ran at all, so I doubt you could get it to work well on anything small.

I think your best bet for using a CRT would be to just go out and get a VGA monitor and use something like an R7 250X which has a VGA output already on it. The resolution won't matter too much, since for the most part GameCube and PS2 games were never in very high resolutions (Almost always games were programmed for NTSC / PAL television, in very few cases do they support even component HD).

Now you mention the Dolphin, developers released new one and even this requires Series S or Series X to run properly and needing so much power in GPU and processor turns me off as the idea of emulating since, without needing to buy so many dying older consoles. That's lot of space to take up which I have need to rebuild, repair and test. Whole thing about emulating is to get anyone interested to play old games with their computer that aren't high end, mostly low to mid end.

Cheers,

There’s still performance variants out there (iishiikura) that revert some of the biggest changes in exchange for compatibility/accuracy, you can typically run native res so long as you have the minimum OpenGL and a decent enough core 2 duo. This is however how I feel about n64 and ps2, in which all the lower end solutions are imperfect or don’t exist.