Video Card Roundup - DVD Quality, Features & Performance - October 2000

DVD meets the PC

When DVD drives began appearing on store shelves of popular computer retail sales locations, they were generally bundled with much more than the cable and occasional drivers disk they are now.  Instead, DVD drives generally came as a package, that package included some software, but more importantly, the bundle included a hardware decoder card. 

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The reason for this was simple, CPUs weren’t powerful enough back then to handle the very intensive task of DVD playback yet there was a demand for the adoption of DVD support on the PC.  The solution to this problem was to offload the task of decoding DVD streams from the CPU, onto a PCI card, in this case the decoder cards that were bundled in these DVD packages. 

This solution obviously did have its downsides.  For starters, it required that yet another PCI slot was occupied by a card.  This was during the period of time where 5 and 6 PCI slot configurations were not incredibly popular on motherboards, and in many cases they were unheard of, combined with up to two PCI slots for your video cards (we all remember the two card, Voodoo2 SLI setups), and maybe a SCSI controller, the fact that you had to have an additional PCI card just so you could watch DVDs was a bit of a discouragement. 

However the fact that you’d lose a slot wasn’t the biggest concern at all.  If you remember back to the days of the aforementioned Voodoo2s that were incredibly popular, or even back to 3dfx’s first victory with the original Voodoo, you will recall that one of the biggest complaints about these 3D-only cards was regarding their pass-through cable.  While the Voodoo2 was much better than the original Voodoo about this, the fact of the matter was that in order for you to use the accelerators, you would have to plug your monitor into the Voodoo card, then use a pass through cable to plug into your 2D card.  Often times, especially at higher resolutions, this resulted in some pretty nasty 2D output because of the signal degradation caused by this pass-through. 

DVD decoder cards were the same way, they required a pass through cable as well.  And if you had a 3D card such as the original Voodoo or the Voodoo2 in conjunction with a DVD decoder card things got even worse. 

Last but not least, DVD decoder cards added what would eventually become an unnecessary cost to the price tag associated with being able to play DVDs on your computer. 

It didn’t take much foresight to realize that the life of hardware DVD decoder cards was limited, but without the power in today’s CPUs, where else would the DVD decoding process be offloaded to?