[no subject]

Fri May 31 2002 10:02:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)

So I got my new video card in yesterday and took some time to try it out and give it some testing. I'm pretty damn impressed! The TV tuner stuff works WAY better than my old AIW128 card, and the software is improved as well. I did some test recording and the performance seemed significantly better! GTA3 looks damn near perfect on this card! Playing around with resolutions and the antialiasing functions didn't work as well as I had expected...with antialiasing on, the game slows down quite a bit. Any way, I can run GTA3 in 1024x768 now smoothly! It plays like a completely different game. Now if only I could get past the mission I'm stuck on... I do have a few gripes about the card and/or software though. First, I spent a good amount of time trying to get TV out enabled at 800x600 while maintaining my hi res desktop resolution. No go. I can't, for the life of me, find any way to change this. The only way to get properly sized tv output is to set the desktop to 800x600, which I still hate to do because it shifts all my icons around. Also, the ATI multimedia center likes to grab file types and icons without prompting you. All mpeg and avi files pointed to the ATI file viewer without prompting me...and I could find no software setting to remove these types. I was also a bit confused by the video overlay stuff with tv-output...you have to configure the tv as the primary monitor in order to display movies in Windows Media Player or the ATI File Viewer. I couldn't find this documented anywhere! Other than those rather nitpicky things, I love the card a lot! Freedom Downtime finally had enough posts to USENET for me to complete the download. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but I'm still stoked!