Radeon 9200 in PowerMac G5 dual for 1080p movies

[davidelvampiro]

Hello,

I need to know if I could play HD movies (1080p) well in a PowerMac G5 dual 2 GHz and 2´5 ram with the Ati Radeon 9200.

Now I have the original AGP 8x nVidia GeForce FX5200 Ultra with 64 MB vRAM but it can´t play 1080p movies. I want to buy a full HD tv.

Also I need to know if I could connect the DVI port to my samsung monitor and the VGA or S-video to my old samsung tv, all at the same time. Can I use the monitors to show different content at the same time? I know it is possible with DVI monitors.

If I can I would like use the full HD tv for HD movies (Ati Radeon 9200), DVI monitor to work (nVidia GeForce) and old analog tv for tv shows (Ati Radeon 9200 with S-video).

Also I have a Miglia capture video card in this computer.

Sorry for my simple english and thanks for yours answers.

David

 

[Eidorian]

You're looking at buying a new computer for 1080p video.

 

[Mord]

You certainly would not want a radeon 9200, they're old and pants, quicktime is generally a bit rubbish at playing HD content, you could just switch to VLC and it'll run fine on your powermac, you do *NOT* need to buy a new computer, if you want a faster graphics card get an x800XT, you can still find mac versions of the cards about the place for ~£300

VRAM is not particularly important a 9200 would be universally worse than your 5200 even for HD content. An x800XT to replace your 5200 would be far better than separate cards.

 

[Firefly2002]

Why would an x800 be better? I'd thought that there was specific hardware on the card for HD content, and the speed of the GPU and memory didn't play a part. Is that wrong?

I also thought that the only cards that supported that kind of playback were made within the last year. Wrong too? Or is that only for hardware Blu-Ray?

 

[macz1]

In OS X, HD playback is exclusively performed by the CPU. A different graphics card would not change anything to the playback performance of your computer. As mentioned before, the only thing you can do is to try another player than Qucktime. But keep in mind that H.264 is a very demanding video codec both for encoding and decoding.

 

[Firefly2002]

Hm. Is that just because there's no hardware support for it yet then?

And... wouldn't that also mean the video card makes no difference? ;P

Yeah, QT sucks. It used to be really good.. at least in my experience it was a better quality player and had better quality video than the competition when the Classic Mac OS was still around. Not so much anymore.

 

[Eidorian]

Hm. Is that just because there's no hardware support for it yet then?

And... wouldn't that also mean the video card makes no difference? ;P

Yeah, QT sucks. It used to be really good.. at least in my experience it was a better quality player and had better quality video than the competition when the Classic Mac OS was still around. Not so much anymore.

We're already two generations into video cards that support the decoding of h.264 (nVidia 7/8/9, ATI X1xxx/2xxx/3xxx) and about 1.5 into the video cards that support Blu-ray/HD-DVD. The problem being that OS X doesn't support any sort of GPU based decoding of said media.

You're going to be relying on raw CPU power so that why I suggested a new Mac.

 

[Tracer]

1080P is a bit of a stretch for PPC architecture.

It's not that the hardware can't do it, its that the software for playing them is poorly coded for Mac and the PPC really hurts decoding.

Tracer

 

[MacsRgr8]

I have experimented with 1080p movie son G5's a lot...

Smooth playback is heavily dependant on the codec. The H.264 codec used in the QuickTime HD movies us a CPU killer.

Here I found difference in a Power Mac G5 Dual 1.8 GHz, GeForce 6800 Ultra, 3.5 GB RAM, and a Power Mac G5 Dual Core 2.0 GHz GeForce 6600, 2 GB RAM.
The Dual 1.8 had a very hard time getting 30 fps.... the Dual Core 2.0 quite easily.

But MPEG-2 encoded 1080p movies were easily handled by VLC on both Power Macs.

Just try out the QuickTime HD movies linked above. You'll get a clearer picture then.