DVDMax of other manufacturers

[jjokiranta]

Hi.

At some point I have to update my system and unfortunately it seems that I have to give up on Matrox. I'm sure that I will be satisfied quality and speed wise but what about all the nice features that I'm used to as a Matrox user. Especially DVDMax.

Does Nvidia and ATI have their own implementation of DVDMax? What are the main differences when compared to Matrox's DVDMax? Any pros or cons?

[dZeus]

I can only speak of ATI, as I've tried their Theater mode in the Catalyst 3.x series, in combination of outputting to a SDTV (native PAL/NTSC):

They can't differentiate between overscan mode for video (i.e. theater mode) and configurable underscan for the desktop (i.e. clone mode on Matrox cards). Overscan is either enabled for all tv-out modes, or underscan is.

When I tried the catalyst drivers, 16:9 output for TV was broken too, but I suppose they should have fixed that by now.

I also don't remember being able to play stuff when minimized to the taskbar (like some applications do with the Matrox cards).

As far as tv-out quality, it is much worse than on Matrox cards (s-video), and they don't have SCART-RGB output support as G-series cards do.

[Dr Mordrid]

If you check the major video editing site reviews (Digital Media Net etc.) you'll soon discover that they're in love with the Parhelia and P-750 for editing rigs; mainly because of the working 16:9 support, reliable scaling to either the video file or video window aspect ratio, ability to reverse field order to a TV and high quailty of PureVideo/DVDMAX.

Those plus the 3 monitor support (4 monitors total with a card like the RT.X100 Xtreme or Storm2 that have their own analog/S-Video output) make them dynamite for editing workstations.

Dr. Mordrid