Wings card. Performance enhancement?

[jovianartifact]

Hello friends. I have finally acquired a Wings A/V card for my Beige G4 with the intent to play PS1 games and capture ancient VHS tapes. It works, however I notice the video is very choppy when viewing with AVP; I tried HackTV and BTV(sp?) and they too work, but with little improvement on the video stream aspect. Oddly enough, captured video plays back fine with no stutter or audio channel desync like I’ve heard about. I have a Rage 128 as my primary GPU and a DB15 adapter plugged into the onboard Rage II, G4/500, 512MB RAM, and a fresh PRAM batt. Is there anything I can do to improve the video quality? I would have thought the G4 would help a lot but I guess I was wrong. I plan on replacing the spinning disk inside with an SSD and cleaning the RCA plugs, maybe even adding a SATA card, but that’s all I can really think of unless you guys have any ideas.

 

[Phipli]

I have a Rage 128 as my primary GPU and a DB15 adapter plugged into the onboard Rage II,

Is anything plugged into the Rage 128?

 

[jovianartifact]

Is anything plugged into the Rage 128?

Yes, I’m using the Rage 128 as my primary display with no display connected to the onboard Rage II. I haven’t tried it yet, but do you think having a second monitor connected to the Rage II would help? Like if I ran AVP on the monitor being served by the Rage II so the CPU doesn’t have to send the video data all over the place? Just a thought.

 

[ArmorAlley]

In the past, as fast a disk as possible came recommended. A SATA card and SSD may help matters.

 

[Phipli]

Yes, I’m using the Rage 128 as my primary display with no display connected to the onboard Rage II. I haven’t tried it yet, but do you think having a second monitor connected to the Rage II would help? Like if I ran AVP on the monitor being served by the Rage II so the CPU doesn’t have to send the video data all over the place? Just a thought.

I'd try two things, suspect you've tried one already but...

What happens if you remove the Rage and just use the onboard?

What happens if you remove the adapter from the onboard?

In the past, as fast a disk as possible came recommended. A SATA card and SSD may help matters.

If it is capturing ok and just lagging to display during capture, I don't suspect it is the disk, feels like the disk is keeping up better than the display.

 

[jovianartifact]

At first I had nothing plugged into the onboard Rage II but I quickly realized that *something* needs to be connected to the socket in order for the video in on the Wings to become available. If I remove the adapter, audio works but video does not. I haven’t tried removing the Rage 128 and using solely the Rage II, as the latter doesn’t quite cut the mustard in 3D performance.

If it is capturing ok and just lagging to display during capture, I don't suspect it is the disk, feels like the disk is keeping up better than the display.

That’s what I figured, I was kind of grasping at straws here

 

[Phipli]

I haven’t tried removing the Rage 128 and using solely the Rage II, as the latter doesn’t quite cut the mustard in 3D performance.

But try using the onboard video, because the onboard Rage chip is doing the actual capture, so it doesn't have to push the video over the PCI bus to display it. The VRAM is faster than the PCI bus, so PCI is probably a bottleneck that won't be there if you do it all on the one chip. Just move your monitor cable over, don't bother removing the Rage 128.

 

[jovianartifact]

So you think running two displays and just using AVP, et. al on the Rage II’s monitor would alleviate some of the chop? That’s what I’m thinking, I’ll have to try it when I’m home next and I’ll report back.

 

[Phipli]

So you think running two displays and just using AVP, et. al on the Rage II’s monitor would alleviate some of the chop? That’s what I’m thinking, I’ll have to try it when I’m home next and I’ll report back.

Possibly, or one monitor on the Rage II while you're doing video capture.

 

[croissantking]

I would suspect the same, that you should view captured video on the display connected to the onboard Rage II.

 

[jovianartifact]

UPDATE: Moving the monitor from the Rage 128 to the integrated Rage II completely solved the chop issue. I have not tried two monitors at once yet, but I doubt it’ll make a difference. Thanks to @Phipli for the suggestion.

To wrap up for those of you googling in the future with a problem like mine, in order to get your Wings card working properly…
view the preview stream on the display connected to onboard video for maximum performance and reduction of stutter / choppiness / frame drops
if you must have a monitor plugged into a second video card, you must have something, anything plugged into the onboard DB15 port or the Wings card video won’t become available to software. Audio capture will still work, however.
SSW doesn’t seem to make a difference in my experience as some say; all my experiments were performed on 9.2.x and I still get good performance.

Will update with more findings, if necessary. Gotta upgrade that ROM so I can dual boot OS X and experiment some more…

 

[Phipli]

Audio capture will still work, however.

Yeah, audio is managed by a different chip (screamer?), the onboard ATI chip does video though as you say.

 

[Phipli]

Will update with more findings, if necessary. Gotta upgrade that ROM so I can dual boot OS X and experiment some more…

You should be able to even with early ROMs... It was just... A little flakey.

 

[jovianartifact]

You should be able to even with early ROMs... It was just... A little flakey.

I got enough flakes with my dandruff, I don’t wanna deal with more

Yeah, audio is managed by a different chip (screamer?), the onboard ATI chip does video though as you say.

indeed