I did it again: damn you ATI!

In this post only about six months ago I berated myself for buying an ATI-chipset graphics card for use in a Linux system.  I titled that post “Why I probably will never buy ATI again…”, as if I knew that I’d make the same mistake again.  Sure enough…

I had problems with my MythTV frontend playing particular recordings; I eventually worked out that it was HD recordings it couldn’t manage (this helped me discover the switch to HD of a previously SD stream coming out of Ten).  I figured that a swap of hardware under the frontend would be nice, to get a better CPU platform and better output capability under it.  I went shopping at my local friendly poota-shop’s website, and came up with a couple of contenders.

Looking at their site (and at the ASUS site), most of the integrated-video boards I saw seemed to be using nVidia chips.  Confident I was going to be making a sound decision, I set off to the store and ended up leaving with an Asus M2A-VM HDMI under my arm.  The clincher was my need for a real S/PDIF output, which the M2A-VM board has on the little riser-card it uses to provide HDMI, S-Video and Component video out.

Some of you will already have seen my error.  🙂

The nVidia board with HDMI I had seen on the ASUS site was the M2N-VM HDMI.  The M2A-VM HDMI is obviously an ATI chipset board.  In my quest for S/PDIF, to save myself a few bucks for a header adapter, I again shot myself in the foot with the ATI bullet.

Sure enough, I had huge problems getting the thing to work.  Frame rates in MythTV, no matter what I did, were abysmal.  I tried installing Mythbuntu again to see if later drivers would help (compared to those on the existing Knoppmyth R5F1 build I am running), to no avail[1].

I was considering lumping it, and sitting on it until things catch up and I can make it work, but I think I’ll just go back to the store and try and switch it for either the M2N-VM DVI (no S/PDIF) or M2N-VM DH (this has onboard S/PDIF but also costs an extra AU$40 thanks to all the WiFi and other guff it comes with).  Unfortunately the store doesn’t have the M2N-VM HDMI, which would let me keep the future capability for  a HDMI-capable display, but by the time I look at needing HDMI I’m likely to be needing to replace the thing again anyway.

To add insult to injury, when I put the old MythTV frontend box back I used a low profile case which meant I had to leave out the old nVidia FX5200 it was running off and go with the onboard Via graphics.  I had heard that some of the Via chips had MPEG2 smarts, and it seems to be true: this old box with what I thought was the crappy cheapo onboard graphics chip now seems to have no trouble with HD output to VGA.

Sigh.

[1] Apparently some victimsowners of the M2A-VM HDMI have had success downloading the very latest drivers directly from ATI rather than sticking with those provided by their distro.  If I get time to give that a run I’ll report.