Removing Mottling, Jagged Motion Video with DVI Output on RADEON

[Will]

I have attached an LCD by DVI cable to an X600 Pro running Windows XP Media
Center, primarily for high definition video playback. Comparing against a
normal VGA connection, I'm a little disappointed by the DVI / LCD output.
I'm having these problems:

1) When colors change gradually over a region of the screen (from white to
light grey for example), you see a type of mottling effect rather than a
gradual shift in color.

2) When playing high motion video, the video blurs, or even worse will
occasionally stop for a 1/4 second then continue.

I'm running DirectX 9.0c on a 1920x1080p LCD. The problem appears worst
in Quicktime 7.0 when playing 1080p high definition movie trailers (e.g.,
King Kong).

Is there a RADEON model that overcomes these problems, or are the symptoms I
am describing present in even the latest X1000 series?

 

[First of One]

Do a simple test: connect your LCD to the DVI port using the DVI-VGA adapter
(essentially getting analog video). If the problem persists, it may be
caused by the DVI output being recognized as a secondary monitor, so certain
hardware accelerated video functions aren't kicking in.

1. Connect the LCD to the DVI port.
2. Go into Device Manager and remove both monitors from the list; reboot.
3. Go into BIOS and enable AGP Fast Writes (for unknown reasons this is
necessary to get video acceleration in some cases)
4. When you get back to the windows desktop, ensure your LCD is recognized
as "Monitor 1" in Display Properties, and nothing is being detected as
"Monitor 2".

If the problem persists, go through the Quicktime Player options and look
for things like "video mixing renderer (VMR)", "overlay", or "hardware
acceleration" and toggle them one by one.

 

[Will]

If everything is setup okay and working, should you need to manually enable
settings like "Hardware Acceleration" and VMR in the individual video
playback applications?

 

[First of One]

It depends on the each application's defaults. For example, VMR is needed to
display text file-based subtitles, but is more of a CPU hog and may have
problems with multi-monitor configurations. There's no right or wrong option
here.