After a month's waiting, I finally received my RADEON AIW in the mail on Monday. I yanked out my old trusty G400 Max and installed the new card. Here's my system configuration:
MSI 694PRO dual-processor motherboard with two Pentium III 800 processors
SBLive! Platinum
256MB SDRAM
Sony GDM-F500 21" monitor
And here's my initial impression after 2 days of use:
2D image quality: I chose Matrox as my brand of choice for the past 5 years because I am very concerned with 2D image quality. Moving to ATI was a big gamble for me, due to the company's poor reputation in this area. But when it comes to RADEON AIW, my fear proved to be unwarranted. I use 1600x1200x85Hz and even at this resolution, the card produced an image that's virtually undistinguishable from the G400.
There is, however, one Matrox 2D feature that I miss a lot: PixelTouch. This is the capability that allows you to zoom in on a particular area of the screen for a closer look. It is very useful for me when my eyes get tired late at night and I want to read screen text with less effort, as well as when I want to position controls on a form with pixel-level precision when designing Delphi applications. The RADEON has nothing like this, forcing me to rely on the Magnifier application that comes with Win2K, which isn't nearly as convenient.
DVD playing: Simply awesome. Image quality is superb. The interface is very usable. To my surprise, the card can play DVDs smoothly even at 1600x1200x32-bit! G400 simply wouldn't play DVDs at this resolution and color depth, and at the lowered color depth of 1600x1200x16-bit, the video would stutter from time to time. ATI's DVD capabilities is thus a major improvement over what G400 offered me.
I am experiencing one anomaly with DVD: the SPDIF passthrough simply doesn't work. When it is enabled, no singal is emitted from the port, and the video playback stutters and stretches anamorphic video to 4:3 aspect ratio. This may have something to do with the VIA chipset, dual processor, Windows 2000, or all of the above. I have to contact tech support and try the card on different computers to reach a conclusion. For the time being, though, digital audio is out of the question.
TV viewing/recording: This is by far the most disappointing of all the features of the card, even though it was a major incentive for buying it. Having used a Happauge WinTV card, I can tell you that the image quality is not NEARLY as good. Compared to the sharp and colorful image produced by WinTV, AIW's output is fuzzy and dull.
Using the recording functions causes so much instability problems on my system that it's virtually unusable. I can't record three times without causing a blue screen. For the MPEG-2 clips it did manage to record, the image quality is virtually indistinguishable from the TV output, which isn't saying much considering the poor quality of the latter to begin with. On the other hand, the quality of recorded sound is so full of noise that it's unlistenable. A call to tech support--when I have the time to make one--may help me resolve some of these problems, but for the meantime I must refrain from using TIVO-like features to avoid certain crash.
I don't have any comment yet to offer on 3D performance, but a recent OpenGL benchmark done by Anand showed that the Win2K driver is pretty abysmal compared to the Win9x counterpart.
MSI 694PRO dual-processor motherboard with two Pentium III 800 processors
SBLive! Platinum
256MB SDRAM
Sony GDM-F500 21" monitor
And here's my initial impression after 2 days of use:
2D image quality: I chose Matrox as my brand of choice for the past 5 years because I am very concerned with 2D image quality. Moving to ATI was a big gamble for me, due to the company's poor reputation in this area. But when it comes to RADEON AIW, my fear proved to be unwarranted. I use 1600x1200x85Hz and even at this resolution, the card produced an image that's virtually undistinguishable from the G400.
There is, however, one Matrox 2D feature that I miss a lot: PixelTouch. This is the capability that allows you to zoom in on a particular area of the screen for a closer look. It is very useful for me when my eyes get tired late at night and I want to read screen text with less effort, as well as when I want to position controls on a form with pixel-level precision when designing Delphi applications. The RADEON has nothing like this, forcing me to rely on the Magnifier application that comes with Win2K, which isn't nearly as convenient.
DVD playing: Simply awesome. Image quality is superb. The interface is very usable. To my surprise, the card can play DVDs smoothly even at 1600x1200x32-bit! G400 simply wouldn't play DVDs at this resolution and color depth, and at the lowered color depth of 1600x1200x16-bit, the video would stutter from time to time. ATI's DVD capabilities is thus a major improvement over what G400 offered me.
I am experiencing one anomaly with DVD: the SPDIF passthrough simply doesn't work. When it is enabled, no singal is emitted from the port, and the video playback stutters and stretches anamorphic video to 4:3 aspect ratio. This may have something to do with the VIA chipset, dual processor, Windows 2000, or all of the above. I have to contact tech support and try the card on different computers to reach a conclusion. For the time being, though, digital audio is out of the question.
TV viewing/recording: This is by far the most disappointing of all the features of the card, even though it was a major incentive for buying it. Having used a Happauge WinTV card, I can tell you that the image quality is not NEARLY as good. Compared to the sharp and colorful image produced by WinTV, AIW's output is fuzzy and dull.
Using the recording functions causes so much instability problems on my system that it's virtually unusable. I can't record three times without causing a blue screen. For the MPEG-2 clips it did manage to record, the image quality is virtually indistinguishable from the TV output, which isn't saying much considering the poor quality of the latter to begin with. On the other hand, the quality of recorded sound is so full of noise that it's unlistenable. A call to tech support--when I have the time to make one--may help me resolve some of these problems, but for the meantime I must refrain from using TIVO-like features to avoid certain crash.
I don't have any comment yet to offer on 3D performance, but a recent OpenGL benchmark done by Anand showed that the Win2K driver is pretty abysmal compared to the Win9x counterpart.
