Is the VooDoo 4 or 5 DVD compatable ?

[SpeedRacerOne]

Would anyone know if the VooDoo 4 or 5 have hardware DVD decoding built in? I didn't see on there web site. Thanks

 

[DaveB3D]

Well it isn't a decoder no. DVD's play perfectly on it as long as you have probably a 500 MHz or higher CPU. My 600 plays them perfectly.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

Ok no video card is incompatible with a dvd(atualy this should read that no video card is unable to dispaly Mpeg2 video streams). You dont need decoding assist. Any 500MHz cpu will be good enough to decode the stream.

 

[BFG10K]

Well speed isn't the only issue here. With proper DVD acceleration the image quality of the picture will increase dramatically. Running DVDs in software rendering just looks crap. I'm sorry to say it but the Voodoos are very poor at playing DVD movies compared to nVidia's or ATi's offerings.

 

[Auric]

Well, I have commented on this several times recently. Voodoo scaling is sh1te so full screen quality at least will be substandard even if the 2D is generally acceptable. NVIDIA is better but not on par with ATI or S3. The hardware acceleration does not neccessarily improve the picture, only off loads work from the CPU. I would assume the full software decode would be the most reliable quality-wise, but again still depends on the quality of the chip's output. The quality of my Savage is superb, with or without motion compensation. I posted a link to an excellent comparison awhile back if you care to search.

 

[DaveB3D]

I'll be honest, I've not done a side-by-side comparision by any means, but running PowerDVD I honestly have not been able to tell the difference between the V5 and GTS. Maybe I just haven't looked enough, but I really haven't noticed a difference.