Best video card for transitions?

[Pat]

Hi all!

I recently purchased a new Dell 8400 for use showing powerpoint
presentations. The transitions suck! All MS transitions are very choppy. Here
are the specs.

Dell 8400, 3.2HT Intel, 512MB 533 Ram, 160GB SATA, ATI X300 PCI-X 128MB
video card. Video is displayed in 800x600 with 32bit color and powerpoint
hardware acceleration is enabled.

Sofware is XP Pro with SP2, Directx 9.0c, Powerpoint 2003 with SP1 and
latest catalyst video card drivers from ATI.

The user claims that if monitor 2 is set as primary, the transitions are
okay but not great or near as good as the previous video card which was a
NVidia 5200.

So are there any tips that might get better results, or should I invest in a
new video card and if so what is a recommendation for a outstanding video
card, short of 3dlabs. The pc is used only for powerpoint.

TIA,

Pat

 

[Sonia]

That graphics card should give you excellent results and I would doubt that it
is the problem. I have an ATI Radeo 9600 Pro on a 3Ghz machine and get
excellent results. Of course, I defrag my hard drives regularly, keep my Temp
folder cleaned out, etc. However, I have not applied Service Pack 2 to Win XP.
I'm waiting for a compelling reason to update.

What transitions are being used? I'm assuming that you mean slide transitions
as opposed to animations, right? Just out of curiosity, how large are the
presentations being tested? And does the problem occur with all presentations
or just one? Do the presentations include a lot of video and audio?

Have you tried lowering graphics hardware acceleration? See:

How to set graphics hardware acceleration back
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00129.htm

What else is running on the system?

 

[Pat]

Sonia,

Thanks for the reply. Well this is a brand new computer and came with SP2
installed. The hard drive was defragmented after Office was installed. All
temp folders were also cleaned out. Actually I was mistaken most of the
problems were from animations that were being applied to text boxes like the
slide in. All animations that are used are the default that come with ppt.
The only other loaded application is Symantec Corp AV 9.0, which is set to
scan the harddrive 4 hours earlier. However, the problem was noted before it
was actually installed.

The presentations are small and usually less than 1mb. There is also no
audio or video being displayed in the presentation. So far, the three
presentations that have been used all had the same problem.

I haven't set the acceleration lower. I thought that was more for things
like artifacts that showed up or corrupted images. Could that actually make a
difference in the desplay for ppt? Should I also unselect the hardware
acceleration in powerpoint?

Thanks,

Pat

 

[Sonia]

Yes, disable hardware acceleration in PowerPoint as well. I'm just suggesting
that you try it to see if it makes a difference. It's easy to do and worth
eliminating from the possibilities.

From your description it sounds like a resource/performance problem. I would be
happy to test one of the presentations here. My email address is sonia @
soniacoleman . com (remove the spaces). That would allow me to take a look at a
couple of other things I'm thinking could be the cause.