ATI and NVIDIA: Quick Look at HDTV Overscan Compensation

Final Words

Quite frankly, neither method, in our opinion, is necessarily better or worse than the other. They both do the overscan compensation job. Granted, NVIDIA's overscan shift doesn't allow you to see everything at once and is dependent on cursor position. But ATI's method basically manipulates the timings for a specific resolution that is optimized for a specific HDTV resolution. On the other hand, NVIDIA is much easier to set up and interact with on a settings level.

However, we should note that neither solution provides a decent way to fix the overscan problem as it relates to gaming. Either way you go, you won't be able to play games locally or online because you either can't see the whole screen or the image output is too small, since games are actually run in predetermined resolutions (i.e. running Jedi Academy on 1024 x 768 for a 720p output gets overscan).

We should note that overscan in games is related to ATI HDTV output. With NVIDIA, there is no overscan, but you get really poor resolution handling, since 1024 x 728 in Jedi Academy under a 720p output produces an image that takes up less than half of the screen than when you are in desktop mode (enlarging the overall image size doesn't change the issue). This doesn't help to put NVIDIA at the head of pack. If you are outputting to HDTV for other purposes, such as PVR or web browsing, this isn't so much of an issue, since you are reliant on the overscan of the desktop resolution, rather than the program. Basically, when it comes to gaming, we are going to recommend using native computer resolution output rather than trying to toy around for hours with HDTV output settings that you can somewhat tolerate.

If you are shopping around for a video card that can do HDTV output, ATI provides more purchasing options and is obviously the cheapest way to go should you already own a supported card, but their HDTV output support doesn't provide the fix that everyone is going to be happy with. If you can wait a bit, NVIDIA is supposed to support HDTV output via DVI in ForceWare 65.xx, which won't cost a dime (minus internet associated costs) to download and try out if you already own a GeForce FX or 6800 card. Meanwhile, ATI has no comment on future driver support for HDTV output via DVI.

What NVIDIA does need is a component output dongle or some sort of a separate attachment to provide a more comprehensive HDTV output support for its various cards on the market. Until that happens, eVGA's GeForce FX 5700 Personal Cinema is going to have to do, which isn't saying much considering that it is NVIDIA's fastest multimedia card that does HDTV output via component cables.