I finally got my hands on one of these beasties, and here are a few
preliminary observations:
Installation: 90%
The install was easy both for hardware and drivers, and the manual was
fairly clear on what needed to be done. My system had a few warnings
during driver install, but I think thats due to problems in my Windows
setup. There was no onscreen indicator to show the progress of files
copied during the install; I did not think that just the message
"Installing xxxx drivers" was enough to let me know how the install
was progressing.
First Looks: 80%
I have an exclamation mark on "WDM Multimedia Driver", but that doesn't
seem to be affecting the Multimedia Center from running.
Video playback: OMFG!!! 95%
As a Quick and Dirty test of video playback, I replayed a few clips
of Anime music videos I've been collecting; to compare the video quality
now against the way they looked on my old AIW Pro (Rage Pro) card.
On the old card, playing anything back at full screen on higher than
800x600 resolution started looking very pixellated.
On the AIWR, playback at 1152x864 of a (352x240) video stream still
shows close to DVD quality. This is exactly what I was expecting
from the video enhancement features that the Radeon was supposed to
provide.
I can't give 100% until I see the quality of TV-Out playback, but so
far, I am quite impressed.
Points off for: The %@#&% install didn't include the old ATI codecs!!
While I am very glad that this card allows me to capture in MPEG
format, I still have a collection of captures that were done using the old
ATI VCR 1.0 and 2.0 formats. I would like to still be able to play
them back, or at least convert them to MPEG now; but I can do neither,
because they were not reinstalled with the new ATI software.
I can see why there weren't included (no longer needed for new captures),
but an upgrade warning of some sort would have been nice.
As it stands, ATI does provide a link to the codecs at
http://support.ati.com/drivers/fix/ATIVCRX.html
from which I can try to reinstall the VCR 2 codecs and convert my
old captures to MPEG. I'll try to post a followup to let others
who might face the same situation know how it went.
Overall, my system seems a little snappier with this card on a
FIC-VA503+ w/ AMD K6-III 450. I may have to update drivers and tweak
a few settings to attain true All-in-Wonder nirvana, but so far things
are going well.
BTW: Yes, it is MMC 7.0, so you AIW 128 users can keep up hopes that
it will be released soon for you too.
Corrections/ Informational:
Contrary to other reports I've heard, this card does include the SPDIF
connector for output of digital audio. I can't truly test
this because I have neither digital speakers or a DVD drive at this time.
preliminary observations:
Installation: 90%
The install was easy both for hardware and drivers, and the manual was
fairly clear on what needed to be done. My system had a few warnings
during driver install, but I think thats due to problems in my Windows
setup. There was no onscreen indicator to show the progress of files
copied during the install; I did not think that just the message
"Installing xxxx drivers" was enough to let me know how the install
was progressing.
First Looks: 80%
I have an exclamation mark on "WDM Multimedia Driver", but that doesn't
seem to be affecting the Multimedia Center from running.
Video playback: OMFG!!! 95%
As a Quick and Dirty test of video playback, I replayed a few clips
of Anime music videos I've been collecting; to compare the video quality
now against the way they looked on my old AIW Pro (Rage Pro) card.
On the old card, playing anything back at full screen on higher than
800x600 resolution started looking very pixellated.
On the AIWR, playback at 1152x864 of a (352x240) video stream still
shows close to DVD quality. This is exactly what I was expecting
from the video enhancement features that the Radeon was supposed to
provide.
I can't give 100% until I see the quality of TV-Out playback, but so
far, I am quite impressed.
Points off for: The %@#&% install didn't include the old ATI codecs!!
While I am very glad that this card allows me to capture in MPEG
format, I still have a collection of captures that were done using the old
ATI VCR 1.0 and 2.0 formats. I would like to still be able to play
them back, or at least convert them to MPEG now; but I can do neither,
because they were not reinstalled with the new ATI software.
I can see why there weren't included (no longer needed for new captures),
but an upgrade warning of some sort would have been nice.
As it stands, ATI does provide a link to the codecs at
http://support.ati.com/drivers/fix/ATIVCRX.html
from which I can try to reinstall the VCR 2 codecs and convert my
old captures to MPEG. I'll try to post a followup to let others
who might face the same situation know how it went.
Overall, my system seems a little snappier with this card on a
FIC-VA503+ w/ AMD K6-III 450. I may have to update drivers and tweak
a few settings to attain true All-in-Wonder nirvana, but so far things
are going well.
BTW: Yes, it is MMC 7.0, so you AIW 128 users can keep up hopes that
it will be released soon for you too.
Corrections/ Informational:
Contrary to other reports I've heard, this card does include the SPDIF
connector for output of digital audio. I can't truly test
this because I have neither digital speakers or a DVD drive at this time.
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