Do I need to upgrade my graphics card?

October 10, 2005 7:57 AM

I've recently got into watching sports webcasts but find that the picture quality isn't great. My internet connection is 400Mb/sec so I suspect that the problem lies with my graphics card which is a Mobility Radeon 7500. Is there some way to confirm this before I splash the cash and upgrade it? I'm running on Windows XP and have 512Mb RAM. I'm not sure what else is relevant.
posted by PurpleJack to computers & internet (10 answers total)

I doubt the problem is on your end. Streaming internet video is not usually of very high quality to begin with.
posted by odinsdream at 7:58 AM on October 10, 2005

Is it choppy or blurry? If it's blurry, there's probably not much you can do... maybe a standalone monitor would help, but probably it's just compressed video.

If it's choppy, you either have a software problem or are in need of an upgrade. Not sure if you CAN upgrade a video card in a laptop(?).
posted by selfnoise at 8:03 AM on October 10, 2005

DAYYMMM, thats a fast connection. Can I have?!?!

I am happy to inform you that you don't have to spend any money, as even an 5+ year old graphic card would be able to handle streaming video without any quality difference. Pretty much what odinsdream said. Of course the bad news is that you won't be getting a quality improvement unless you find a better webcast.
posted by Sonic_Molson at 8:04 AM on October 10, 2005

Also, what selfnoise said. Video cards in laptops are generally not upgradeable. If you're interested in testing your actual connection speed (against its advertised speed), try one of these (but, really, it's probably plenty fast):

http://www.dslreports.com/stest
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
http://www.itcom.itd.umich.edu/adsl/speedtest.html
posted by odinsdream at 8:14 AM on October 10, 2005

What is the actual transfer data speed of the stream? Even if you have a 400mb connection, the streamer may not want to send you anything faster then 150kbps or something.
posted by delmoi at 8:30 AM on October 10, 2005

People use Radeon 7500s even for playing HDTV on their home theater PCs, so the card should be more than up to it.

If you truly are getting ultra-high-bandwidth video to play and the video quality is bad, maybe you aren't using real video card drivers and are using the built-in Windows VGA drivers, which are terrible for video. ATI usually wants you to download Mobility drivers from the notebook makers, which oftentimes don't make them available or have very out-of-date drivers. You can download drivers from ATI and use the Mobility Modder to patch the drivers so they work on your Mobility card.
posted by zsazsa at 11:25 AM on October 10, 2005

1. You probably don't have a 400mb/sec connection. Even if you do have a 400mb/sec pipe to your ISP, your ISP will aggregate you together with many other pipes, and you will share bandwidth to the "backbone" (tier-1) providers. It is typical for between ten and sixty 1Mbps connections to share a single megabit-per-second link to the backbone. The wholesale rate of a single megabit of unmetered bandwidth is somehwere in the vicinity of US$25-$75 per month. So your 400 MB connection would have a wholesale cost of at least US$10,000 a month for bandwidth alone. More likely, you share a 1mb/sec link with ten other people. Or you might share a gigabit link with up to ten thousand people.

1b. If you are doing this from work, similar math applies. Your company might have 400mb/sec of internet transit, but you are sharing it with all the other employees, servers, etc.

2. The people serving the ideo don't have a 400mb/sec link either, for exactly the same reason. If they design their webcast to require 1mb/sec of bandwidth, then they will need 400 mb/sec in order to server 400 simultaneous viewers. This link will also cost them at least US$10,000 - which means that they need to figure out how to generate that much revenue by streaming sports. More likely, they have compressed the stream down to 128kbps or maybe 256k and then squeeze it through the cheapest fast pipe they can find.

3. The easy way to tell if your computer is capable of displaying high quality video is to download a video to your desktop, and then play it in Windows Media Player. If you can download and play a video, then the issue is in the connection between the sports site and your computer, not your graphics card. If the video is still choppy, try shutting down all Windows programs and then run the video. In particular, make sure you shut down things like Word/Excel/Outlook. Use the Windows Task Manager to ensure that most of your memory and CPU capacity is unused before you try to play the video.
posted by b1tr0t at 11:51 AM on October 10, 2005

If it's choppy, I'd upgrade the RAM before the video card.

/my 2¢
posted by softlord at 11:17 PM on October 10, 2005

It's almost certainly the stream, not the card. Video that's compressed for live streaming, even at high bandwidth, is going to be capped for a lowest-common-denominator speed: ESPN GamePlan, for instance, streams at 400kbps, and I can't think of many live streams that demand more b/w from users, for the reasons that b1tr0t mentioned.

(What video resolution is the stream? What resolution are you viewing it at? A 480x320 stream expanded to full-screen is always going to look chunky.)
posted by holgate at 1:17 AM on October 11, 2005

The picture's blurry rather than choppy. I contacted the webcaster and they're transmitting at 450kb/sec so I guess that's the weak link. Looks like I'll have to stop watching in full-screen.

Thanks to all who took the time to answer.
posted by PurpleJack at 12:46 PM on October 11, 2005