Hello,
I'm about a used ATI Rage LT Pro original, AGP, tv-out, 8mb
what do you think of that piece of hardware? Reliable? Is it enough to play
DivX on a TV screen?
thx
It is reliable and works fine playing Divx or other clips... Even has
partial hardware DVD decoding, motion compensation and IDCT. You
wouldn't get better Divx playback on a newer, even the newest cards,
except on a monitor at very high resolution (far higher resolution
than the DVD or Divx source).
BUT I don't know the quality of the TV-Out.
In general it's best to use S-Video for TV-Out, not composite (RCA
jack). However on a movie you may find quality acceptible, I've never
tried TV-Out on one of those card.
On the other hand, ATI's drivers, PARTICULARLY for these old Rage/Rage
Pro/Rage Pro Turbo/Rage XL chipset cards are still a bit buggy... if
they work fine you're set but if they dont' it may take some patience
getting it working right.
It's also a very cool-running card, low power requirements. Many
don't even have heatsinks on them. This makes it an ideal (in it's
PCI version) for powering a second monitor, having little to no worry
about chassis cooling or power supply adequacy. It's about the only
chipset still being used that doesn't consume significant power.
Well, it's not used on modern/new OEM systems anymore but this chipset
is still used as onboard video on server boards, so at least someone
must think it's reliable.
The other issue with a card this age is the amount of onboard memory.
8MB is enough for 1600x1200 @ 32BPP (full-color) but higher
resolutions will require dropping down to 16BPP color depth. Also
it's slower ramdac will likely make resolutions above 1280x1024
fuzzier and fuzzier the higher the resoulution. Of course this
doesn't affect TV-Out.
3D gaming is certainly not possible with this card, or at least not if
the game is anything better than crude and old. It also wouldn't be
able to properly run some fancy modern screensavers.
Dave
