NVIDIA abandons Vista media center users

By Adam Turner
Sunday, 17 June 2007 19:45

Opinion and Analysis

Thinking of building a Vista-based media center? Don't even bother with the NVIDIA graphics cards, because NVIDIA hasn't bothered to enable some of the most important features in its Vista drivers.

I'm currently building a dual boot XP MCE 2005/ Vista Home Premium media center - I opted for dual boot because people kept telling me Vista isn't ready to be trusted as a mission critical home entertainment device. Media center PCs let you do things like watch and record television (even several channels at once), play DVDs and enjoy your digital library of music, movies and photos. Basically your one-stop entertainment shop.

While I've found Vista's media center surprisingly good, although not perfect, the Vista drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards are a joke if you're building a media center. Cards like Gigabyte's GeForce 8500 GT and 8600 GTS would seem to be dream home theatre graphics cards, the spec sheets read beautifully, but thanks NVIDIA these cards don't deliver the goods.

Problem number one - NVIDIA has scrapped its full screen video mirror feature. This feature would let you play a video full screen on one display (your television) while you use the computer for other things like web surfing on the another display (your monitor). This is a really useful feature if your home theater PC doubles as a general purpose PC conveniently located in the living area. With an NVIDIA card under Vista, the only workaround for this is to run your desktop across both displays and drag the video window to your second display - a far from elegant solution.

According to NVIDIA, full screen video mirroring "is no longer supported due to the new Protected Video Path Output Content Protection (PVP-OPM) in Windows Vista". This sounds like a reasonable excuse, until you realise that cards from NVIDIA's archrival ATI offer this feature under Vista - it's called "theater mode". I guess it's not that hard after all.

Problem number two - NVIDIA is yet to enable overscan adjustment in Vista for low-res displays. What this basically means is if you don't have a fancy new high-def television, chances are you won't be able to see all of the television picture on your television screen and there's nothing you can do about it. Under XP you can adjust the size of the image so if fits your television screen, but with Vista you're stuck with what you get. This can mean important parts of the media center interface are just off your screen, frustratingly out of sight. The only workaround is to tweak the registry to change the position of the interface, but you still lose part of the video picture - again, a far from elegant solution.

Problem number three - even if you do have a fancy high-def television, NVIDIA under Vista doesn't support hardware mpeg acceleration for Vista's default mpeg codec. What this means is the graphics card isn't doing its fair share of the work when it comes to playing video files, instead dumping all the load on the CPU to be done in software. This makes it harder to get a good picture when you're juggling a few high definition recordings - exactly the kind of thing you'd expect to able to do once you'll shelled out all that money for a HD television. Again, rival ATI doesn't have a problem offering this feature.

NVIDIA released new drivers this month, but it still hasn't addressed these problems. Vista has been on the shelves for almost six months, and the betas kicking around for years - how much longer do NVIDIA card owners have to wait before NVIDIA comes to the party? If you're building a Vista-based media center, forget NVIDIA - because they seem to have forgotten about you.