Posted by Jonathan the Red on February 22, 2002 at 12:50:27:
This is a followup to the discussions here and here, regarding "Powered by ATI" cards.
Many video cards with TV output handle the analog encoding through a separate chip... that is, separate from the main GPU core. What this means is that different video card manufacturers could use the same GPU but different TV encoders, and so have wildy different TV out quality. ATI is well-known and well-regarded for using excellent TV encoders and thus producing top-quality S-Video output for those of us with TVs in our MAME cabinets.
ATI, though, licenses its chipsets to other manufacturers, who often don't measure up in the TV encoder department. That's what the linked discussions were about: Radeon VE cards in particular are very often manufactured by third parties, some of whom are almost unknown. (The Radeon VE I bought from eBay is an interesting case: the name of the manufacturer appears absolutely nowhere on the packaging, in the manual, or on the card itself. I still have no idea who made it. There's a picture of the card and the box here... if anyone can identify it, please let me know.)
After doing a bit of research, here's what I'm ready to conclude. Unlike other video cards, the TV encoding circuitry is integrated with the Radeon VE core. This means that any video cards using the Radeon VE chipset will have the same TV encoding as a genuine ATI part. The only chips on my board are the Radeon VE core, the RAM, the BIOS, and two identical small chips that I conjecture are clocks or shift registers.
Third-party cards may (heck, probably will) use cheaper RAM and other components, which may result in quality degradation... but such degradation should be marginal at worst. With a Radeon VE card, you don't have to worry that some shoddy TV encoder will be used in place of ATI's excellent one.
I still have yet to actually try my Generic No-Brand Radeon VE... but I'm a lot more confident now that the TV output should be just fine.