Graphics ATI Radeon cards:TV-out quality is terrible

Ive recently just bought the Sapphire Radeon 9800 pro, Im overwelmed with the cards 3d performance but the Tv out quality is next to terrible. Before I had a lame Geforce FX5200 with terrible performance, but good Tv-out quality. However there were issues with Nvidia drivers steming back nearly 4 years now, even if you had S-video connection setup, the geforce cards only responded with the composite setting enabled, otherwise you would have terrible ripples and barely readable text on the TV. Well i managed to put up with this option for years, because enabling composite mode seem to enable S-Video output quality. But now im stuck with another issue of the same nature with the ATI cards. I bought the ATI 9600XT last year and had the same issue so I took it back and claimed my money back, but now having spent alot more money on the 9800 pro, I am determined to find the answer to why the output is so bad.

Problem:-
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TV-out shows the desktop with ripples on the edges on the windows, the text is barely readerble and there are red lines sqewered at the parallels of the lines.

Only solution found:-
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Run the mode in NTSC D mode, but the output is black & white due to me living in the UK. But the quality is good with NTSC.

I realise there may be an answer somewhere to this problem, so please does anyone have the solution to this issue or know of a software fix etc.

Please help.

 

That's very very unusual. Ive got a 9800pro and ive also used various other Ati, Matrox and Nvidia cards with TV out and ATi are the most compatible and comparible to matrox in TV out quality whereas nvidia are constantly crap unless youve got one with a Philips SA08 chipset.

It should be PAL-I, otherwise you need to play with you TV settings or get better cables cause u might have interferance. Tried a SCART passthru? svideo-svideo-scart-tv? Then u just flick to the scart channel.

 

There was a discussion about this a while back on a MAME-PC arcade machine forum.
It boils down to the fact that a 'Powered by ATI' card will normally use a 3rd party TV-out chipset (or possibly, in your case, Sapphire's own chipset), which are generally pretty pants. 'Built by ATI' cards however, use ATI's own TV-out chipset (obviously), which are always very good in terms of image quality.

My setup is a good example, I have a Powercolour 9800pro and the TV out quality is terrible compared to my old ATI built 7500 (even did a side-by-side comparison!). It sounds like your card has similar TV-out quality to my 9800.

 

That's untrue - 90% of the they use the standard rage theatre chipset, although the traces/caps/resistors are open to change.

 

Well it cant be the cables, becuase the Nvidia card worked fine with the same setup, except you would have to enable composite mode(which was quite daft). So the issue must be with Sapphire's tv chips, but the catlyst options are limited for tv-out control. You cant select a line transmission format Svideo/composite. Is there another way to force the card into composite mode at all?

 

Maybe your card is just faulty.

 

check to see if there's a little jumper to switch between modes on the card


my sapphire 9600xt has a little jumper near the top of the card by the pci bracket for ntsc/pal output on the tv-out