2D Quality

    We all know that 2D quality is something that is very important to many people, and as was first introduced in our Parhelia review we will test the 2D quality of this card, both with black text on a white background and vise-versa.   Also new is a image test with 4 800*600 pictures stitched together to create a 1600*1200 background image.  The monitor used was a refurbished Dell 19" P991 Trinitron monitor, and all tests were run at 1600*1200.  Even though the monitor used for testing is not the best in the world, it is still fairly evident of what many users are using/looking at.  We used the Parhelia and MSI 8888's ability to clone the primary screen to test four of the 5 video out ports of these two cards (cannot test the third head of the Parhelia with clone).  The reference video card was a Matrox G400 (not MAX) which is one of the better 2D video cards that have been released.  So how did the MSI card do against these two 2D champions, in the eyes of our tester from the previous 2D test?

    We can see that in this case (and note that it's just one person's testing) that the Parhelia has equal or better image quality than the MSI card.  The text tests show a fair difference between the two cards, and the tester mentioned that the text displayed by the MSI card was visibly squished and thus harder to read, while Parhelia didn't have any such problems.  Also note that the tester is a very conservative marker and does not raise marks easily, so this might just as easily have been a larger discrepancy between the two cards.  One good note for the MSI card is that the tester couldn't tell the difference between the two heads of the MSI card. 

TV-In/Out Quality

    One major feature of this card is its TV-in/out capabilities, as this is one of the few distinguishing features between this card and most other GeForce 4 MX's available.  The TV-in/out capability is provided by the Philips SAA7114H controller seen below, which connects via the SVHS port on the back of the card, to a 4-port in/out connector also seen below.

    One problem I've found with the TV-in on this card is that it enables Macrovision, everybody's favorite answer to copy protection, but this can also enable itself when copying your home video's or other video work that you try to capture, which can lead to many headaches. 

    But what kind of quality can the TV-in part of this card produce, compared to the ATi TV Wonder.  Both used the SVHS ports with the reference video being provided by the Matrox Parhelia video card's DVD MAX function.  The video is the same used in our TV-out tests mentioned in our Parhelia review.  So lets see how the MSI card fairs with video in, and if anyone would like the uncompressed images please e-mail me.

GeForce 4 MX TV-in from Parhelia

ATi TV Wonder TV-in from Parhelia

    We can see that the ATi TV tuner crops the video fairly badly (look at the right part of the fence on the ATi version and the reference image below).  We can also see a 'honeycomb' design on the ATi image, while the MSI image is nice and smooth.  It seems that the MSI card is doing some realtime smoothing of the video while the ATi card isn't, as we can see by looking at the text as the ATi version is sharper.

    What about TV-out quality?  Let us see how all three competitors (G400, Parhelia, and GF4MX) handle sending the images to the TV-in of the MSI card.  First we will see the reference image taken directly from the VOB file used for testing.

Reference Image
Parhelia TV-out	G400 TV-out
MSI 8888 TV-out

    There was very little difference between the three cards, with the Parhelia and MSI 8888 taking the lead (note that this was just a loop back for the MSI test).  All three are slightly brighter than the reference image, but this is a slight difference.  All in all there should be no problem using any of these cards as a DVD out system or other TV based application   

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