In my experience doing HDMI from a Radeon HD 4670 to my 720p Toshiba tv, it looks like crap compared to using the VGA PC input. I have researched this and I'm not completely sure yet exactly why. It may be something to do with 1:1 pixel mapping capability of your TV. When on VGA, it looks crystal clear, like a computer monitor should, and it picks native resolution at 1366x768 I believe (yes that's not 720 is it). No matter what res I pick over HDMI, I can't get it to look as good and fit the screen. There is one or two resolutions that look native but end up 4:3 or something with black on the sides oddly. I'm switching to a 5770 soon so we'll see how that goes over HDMI. I don't believe that card has VGA at all so I'll be forced into HDMI or using DVI -> VGA adapter or something since my TV doesn't have a DVI input. Hopefully that HDMI looks good. I'll report back how it goes. If this is something related to HDMI DRM stuff I will be pretty annoyed. How do others experience hooking their computer to their TVs... or HTPCs obviously?CA_Steve wrote:This is headed off-topic...but...arjunr wrote:does anyone have an why playing video with integrated graphics or 90% of graphics cards via hdmi to a TV doesn't look as good as say... a ps3 or wdtv high def media player? i would love to build one of these intel integrated graphics machines for a htpc, but in my experience they don't even come close to standalone players.
It could be a couple of things.
- DRM/Hollywood getting in the way. For example, Netflix streams higher data rate to an appliance (PS3, TV, BD player) than via Silverlight on your PC.
- Your TV settings for the PC input. Some TVs, like Samsung LCD, reduce their horrible input lag by removing most of the video processing that makes the picture look good.
- Your gpu doesn't support/has awful support for the file type/resolution you want to stream.
So any ideas for this situation...? arjunr, I'm not sure my situation is the same as yours but it's possible. Have you tried using other inputs?