High res card for Windows 2000?

[jbclem]

What's a good graphics card for my Windows 2000 computer that will let me play 720p avi files? I don't need any more than that, just something that has Win2000 driver support.

 

[bigi]

Matrox G400

 

[ultimatebob]

A Geforce 8400 GS would still have Windows 2000 driver support. The latest drivers do not list it (officially) but the older versions did.

I don't know if you need a PCI, AGP, or PCI-E version, though. If you let us know what computer you have, we can help you figure that out.

 

[tweakboy]

or 7800GS

 

[jbclem]

I have a Dell 400sc computer, no pci-e slots, but pci and one AGP. I had bought an Asus AH3450 card for it, and have tried (without success) some drivers from blackwingcat that were supposed to work(but may have been for the pci-e version). Apparently only Asus makes the AGP version.

Coincidentally, I've been looking for a Geforce 8400 GS, but not knowing for sure if there were drivers available for it. Do you know where I can find the older drivers? I probably should have the drivers in hand before I buy the card.

I'll also look up some information on the Matrox G400


John

 

[ultimatebob]

Try downloading and installing these old drivers, and see if they work with Windows 2000:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_169.21_whql.html

I believe that this was one of the last versions that was backward compatible with 2000 before they dropped support.

 

[jbclem]

Could I go ahead and install these Nvidia Win2000 drivers without installing a Geforce 8400GS card...just to check. Or would that affect the other drivers already present.

 

[Matt84]

No point installing the drivers without having the card installed.

 

[ultimatebob]

No point installing the drivers without having the card installed.

In this case, it might be a good idea just to make sure that the installer runs before spending $30 on a video card that might not work in his OS.

 

[jbclem]

Well, I took a shot at installing the Nvidia drivers. The first thing I saw was a header calling them drivers for Windows 2000/XP, a good sign. I hit next to see the next screen and that triggered the installation, which went almost to completion but a last screen came up saying that the drivers were incompatible with the hardware that was found. Then the installation quit. There's no sign of the installation in Add/Remove Programs, so it must have aborted...which is good.

That gives me some confidence in these drivers, so I've go ahead and look for a Geforce 8400gs and hope it'll boost my computer enough to run 720p videos.

Thanks for the help ultimatebob. And everyone else also.

 

[jbclem]

I finally got a Geforce 8400gs(PCI, 512mb) running on my Windows 2000 computer. But I'm not having any luck playing a 720p .mkv video. The images are jerky and not much fun to watch. I wonder if there are any tweeks that can be made to improve this.

 

[blastingcap]

I finally got a Geforce 8400gs(PCI, 512mb) running on my Windows 2000 computer. But I'm not having any luck playing a 720p .mkv video. The images are jerky and not much fun to watch. I wonder if there are any tweeks that can be made to improve this.

HD5450 or HD6450

 

[SPBHM]

I finally got a Geforce 8400gs(PCI, 512mb) running on my Windows 2000 computer. But I'm not having any luck playing a 720p .mkv video. The images are jerky and not much fun to watch. I wonder if there are any tweeks that can be made to improve this.

I'm not sure the win2000 driver/players even support that, but try MPCHC or VLC, I was able to run 1080p on MPCHC using a PCI 33MHz 8400GS just fine using DXVA (on XP SP3), without it, no way, because of the low bandwidth from PCI 32bit I guess.

if you want to play videos but not pay for a new windows, try the linux xbmc, I've heard it works well with the 8400GS PCI and GPU acceleration.

 

[brianmanahan]

holy crap, people still use windows 2000?

 

[Cerb]

I finally got a Geforce 8400gs(PCI, 512mb) running on my Windows 2000 computer. But I'm not having any luck playing a 720p .mkv video. The images are jerky and not much fun to watch. I wonder if there are any tweeks that can be made to improve this.

What are you playing them back with? If support is in Windows 2000 for offloading MPEG2 and h.264 to the GPU, it should be fine with VLC, or MPC-HC with newish codec filters, like LAV (updated ffdshow). If support plain isn't there for that feature in 2000, though, you're not going to get smooth playback.

 

[jbclem]

I'm using an older version of VLC (0.9.4, also 2.05). I'm trying to play an .mkv file. VLC media information shows it as this:

Codec: H264-MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1)
Resolution: 1280x720
Frame Rate: 25
Decoded Format: Planar 4:2:0 YUV

VLC 0.9.4 plays it but jerkily. CPU% runs at 95-98%
VLC 2.05 freezes on the first frame, also keeps the CPU% in the high 90's

From what I've just read, the Geforce 8400gs generally uses Nvidia PureVideo 2nd generation which is good for offloading H264 and Mpeg-2. There's a Geforce 8400gs with 3rd generation PureVideo that's a bit better. But for Mpeg-4 you need a Geforce 8400gs with 4th generation PureVideo, which isn't mentioned very much and I'd guess it's less common and probably not available in a plain PCI version.

Nvidia PureVideo HD 4th generation (for Mpeg-4) is mostly found in cards such as the GT210, GT220, GT240, and up.

I'm guessing that with the wrong card on PCI, a P4 computer, I've got too much going against me. Probably lucky that this Mpeg-4 file runs at all.

I'd still like to know if anyone has found a Windows 2000 solution for Mpeg-4 video.

 

[Cerb]

Any new(ish) 8400GS should be the ltst model. They made and sold it for years, while the first release model was sold for a fairly short period of time.

What I would try is a newer computer, if you absolutely must use a lonely Windows 2000 PC. Windows 2000 stopped getting support in 2010, so a Core 2, or Athlon II or Phenom II, PC, will generally be well-supported, and any >2GHz one will have the oomph to handle decoding in software, if hardware is not present or if the APIs/libs aren't there in Win2k.

 

[jbclem]

I'm curious if there is a video test(benchmark) that could be run and whose result would tell you if your computer (in it's totality) would successfully run MPEG-4 video files.

And is there a list that would show how many "xxx"persecond were required to successfully run the each of the many different types of video files.

 

[daveybrat]

You needed to pick up an AGP video card, not a PCI version. PCI is sooo slow that no matter how fast the card is, you'll still get stuttering just from the bus bottleneck.

Also, one thing nobody has asked yet is, what are your computer specs?? CPU, Ram??

 

[jbclem]

Easier said than done. I do have an Asus AH3450 AGP and the drivers that are supposed to work in Win2000, but I've failed at installing them so far. I left that for a while as I wanted to try the Geforce 8400gs. Now I'm going back to the AH3450 and we'll see if I can get the drivers working.

My Dell 400sc computer has a P4 2.4 GHz, 3 gb RAM.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

My Dell 400sc computer has a P4 2.4 GHz, 3 gb RAM.

Sorry to be blunt, what you need is not a new graphics card, but a new operating system. Whichever way you look at it, win2k is looong past its sell-by date.

With those specs your PC should be able to handle 7 x86 fine (heck, I've seen 7 run on P3's. Not well but usable). If money is tight you could look at Ubuntu or Mint, both are free and run just fine on a P4. Especially with 3GB RAM.

Oh, and forget using PCI-based graphics cards for doing anything more then putting a picture on screen. PCI only has (purely theoretical, real world is much lower) 133MB/s available, what's more that has to be shared between all connected devices on the bus...

 

[jbclem]

Interestingly, I just tried this same 720p .mkv file on my other P4 2.4 Windows 2000 computer. It's graphics card is a Radeon 9800 Pro, a few years older and considered a slower card than the Geforce 8400gs(PCI card). But the Radeon 9800 Pro is an AGP card, and the .mkv file ran almost perfectly on this computer. So it looks like the difference was the PCI vs AGP, and AGP trumped everything else.

My other lonely, broken, holy crapped, loooong past its date, Windows 2000 P4 2.4 worked pretty well with the older(2003) AGP card. As it has with everything else I run on it (including the Firefox 21, Adobe Flash 11x). It is tricked a bit with an Extended Kernel and various Unofficial Updates Rollups from blackwingcat and Tomasz and an Application Compatibility Launcher. Personally, I prefer older versions of most programs, so if I can watch the occasional HD soccer game or movie, then what may be the stablest(and least annoying) Windows OS is good enough for me.