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Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: displacedtexan on April 14, 2007, 12:13:16 pm

Title: Best video card for hardware rotation?
Post by: displacedtexan on April 14, 2007, 12:13:16 pm
So, I am trying to put video pinball on my vertically oriented cocktail cab....

I got things working pretty well (even rotated!!) on my laptop with a cheap Intel Extreme chipset following the recommendations at this thread:  http://www.vpforums.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36732&perpage=20&highlight=vertical%20monitor&pagenumber=3.

Everything looks good and plays well.  Unfortunately, when I tried this on my cab, while it works when rotated, the pinball doesn't roll smoothly.  I have tried two video cards, both Nvidia (one a Geo Force 6200 and the other a 6800 XT)

I am surprised that my laptop running XP with an Intel graphics chip outperforms my cab running Windows 2000 and a XFX Nvidia GeForce 6800 XT when rotated 90 degrees...

So, here's my question:  What's the best video card (under $100 preferably) that works well rotated?  I am thinking of buying a Radeon card from Newegg and trying that.  If it doesn't perform, I'll return it.

Thanks for the input!!
Title: Re: Best video card for hardware rotation?
Post by: displacedtexan on April 18, 2007, 08:48:36 pm
Well, I purchased a ATI Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB Video Card at Circuit City this weekend, and despite massive installation issues, managed to get hardware rotation to work quite well.  It's really over-kill for MAME, but hey, it works.

Visual pinball, MAME, and Fusion are all working very well rotated 90 degrees via irotate.

I prefer Nvidia over ATI Radeon because of their "better" linux support, but until Nvidia fixes their hardware acceleration while rotated, I'll be sticking with my ATI card....

Hope this helps someone out there...
Title: Re: Best video card for hardware rotation?
Post by: juggle50 on April 19, 2007, 01:02:37 am
How are you rotating VisualPinball?  There was some info on another thread but it sounded like you had to do a lot of work adjusting the tables.
Title: Re: Best video card for hardware rotation?
Post by: blueznl on April 19, 2007, 07:17:18 am
Yeah, I would be interested as well. My interest is in a vertical oriented screen in a cab, but as I understand that causes massive problems with Visual Pinball and Future Pinball?
Title: Re: Best video card for hardware rotation?
Post by: displacedtexan on April 19, 2007, 10:35:39 am
How are you rotating VisualPinball?  There was some info on another thread but it sounded like you had to do a lot of work adjusting the tables.

I rotate my desktop 90 degrees using Irotate (which uses the video cards own drivers/software), load up VisualPinball 6.1 (there's a link to the binary in the thread I posted above, the newer ones don't seem to work as well for this), and then load up the game.  Once the game is loaded, I go to backdrop (button on the left hand side of the screen), then click options (above backdrop), and select none for image (along the right hand side) and set Inclination = 44
Field of View = 10 (you may need to tweak this).  Under preferences -> video options, select "full screen" and an appropriate resolution for your now rotated desktop (in my case it's 768 x 1024 x 32) and press play.

Understand, this really doesn't change the tables at all, just the way they are displayed or "zoomed in". 

Hope this helps!!