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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan Spangenberg who wrote (2177)	8/27/1998 2:27:00 AM
From: Dirk Hente	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

Dan, I have no practical experience with TV/Video cards. What I know is these cards cards come with an on-board tv-decoder and the 'extra' work i.e. digitalization and decoding of the TV signal is done using this special on-board hardware. The decoded digital data stream is then fed into the graphic processor which in turn writes the data into the screen buffer. The communication between graphic chip and tv-decoder is usually done via a special port (look here for an example of a Cirrus Logic system: cirrus.com. The CPU of your computer is not involved at all at least not in a direct way. But the graphic accelerator chip on your card has to do some 'extra' work. It has to refresh a part of the screen buffer at a 50/60 Hz rate and the performance slow down depends on the size of the tv-window.