Video card recommendation?

[waffle]

This may be in a FAQ somewhere, but... Can someone recommend a ATI or Nvidia graphics card with TV-out and hardware encode/decode? I already ordered a PVR-250, so it would have to play nicely with that.

Thanks
Kevin

[stanger89]

Well there are no video cards with hardware encode or decode, however most new cards support hardware acceleration of MPEG playback, the difference is a hardware decoder will use 0-5% of your CPU during playback, while hardware acceleration will use 10-50% (depending on CPU) it's usually about 25-50% less than full software decoding.

Now recommendations: Video cards keep getting better and better, right now I'd probably recommend a Geforce FX 5700, then a Radeon 9600, then a Geforce FX 5200. I'd definitely recommend sticking with DirectX 9 class hardware now, especially since SageTV is supporting DX9 now.

Here's an interesting post from an nVidia employee about the features of the Geforce FX 5200/5700:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...12#post3327912