ATI's All-In-Wonder X1900 Performance And DVD Decoding Quality
by Josh Venning on February 10, 2006 8:45 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
HQV Benchmarks
The HQV Benchmark DVD is made by Silicon Optix and has become a standard for testing the quality of DVD decoders. The tests were made to showcase the capabilities of very high end DVD hardware, and it just happens to make a very objective series of benchmarks for testing more moderately priced DVD players. The DVD contains numerous video clips to test how well the decoder handles some common problem-areas for some of the lower quality players. The videos test things like picture detail and noise reduction, and points are scored for each test according to how well the video processor does.
ATI recently came out with some new drivers which were meant to improve the score on these tests, and today we are testing them against the latest version of NVIDIA's PureVideo decoding. It should be noted that while ATI's DVD decoder is free with an AIW card, the PureVideo decoder adds additional cost to NVIDIA products.
Many of the functions tested in HQV aren't limited in application to DVD decoding. Things like deinterlacing need to happen on the AIW when tuning TV signals as well. This way we can also get an idea of the quality of video the AIW will be capable of in general.
Color Bar/Vertical Detail
The first test on the HQV DVD is the Color Bar/Vertical Detail test. This basically tests how well the video processor tells if something is moving or not, to ensure proper deinterlacing. We found that ATI did slightly better than NVIDIA in this test, as there was some minor flickering that was evident on NVIDIA's side. ATI scored perfectly here.
The HQV Benchmark DVD is made by Silicon Optix and has become a standard for testing the quality of DVD decoders. The tests were made to showcase the capabilities of very high end DVD hardware, and it just happens to make a very objective series of benchmarks for testing more moderately priced DVD players. The DVD contains numerous video clips to test how well the decoder handles some common problem-areas for some of the lower quality players. The videos test things like picture detail and noise reduction, and points are scored for each test according to how well the video processor does.
ATI recently came out with some new drivers which were meant to improve the score on these tests, and today we are testing them against the latest version of NVIDIA's PureVideo decoding. It should be noted that while ATI's DVD decoder is free with an AIW card, the PureVideo decoder adds additional cost to NVIDIA products.
Many of the functions tested in HQV aren't limited in application to DVD decoding. Things like deinterlacing need to happen on the AIW when tuning TV signals as well. This way we can also get an idea of the quality of video the AIW will be capable of in general.
Color Bar/Vertical Detail
The first test on the HQV DVD is the Color Bar/Vertical Detail test. This basically tests how well the video processor tells if something is moving or not, to ensure proper deinterlacing. We found that ATI did slightly better than NVIDIA in this test, as there was some minor flickering that was evident on NVIDIA's side. ATI scored perfectly here.
- ATI: 10
- NVIDIA: 5
- (highest score: 10)
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Sunrise089 - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link
You have identical numbers for w/ AA and w/o. Also, the text's comment on the X1900AIW being playable at all reolutions with AA uses the incorrect numbers.plonk420 - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link
does the ATI decoder give you the option to ADD sharpening? or not at all? my whole reason for wanting a (hardware accellerated) software decoder is so i can have a pic quality rivaling a ("popular") $200 hardware player for whatever extra it would be for the software. supposedly free for ATI or $30 for nVidia (for my application: 2.0 sound)hwhacker - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link
here we go:http://www.bytesector.com/data/bs-article.asp?ID=6...">http://www.bytesector.com/data/bs-article.asp?ID=6...
590/684...I was close.
18+% improvement in 3dmark06, you know that has to translate to something good in gaming.
hwhacker - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link
It uses 2.0ns chips from what I recall, as does newer BBA x1800xl's (instead of 1.4ns).There was one site that did an overclocking section on it, I forget which. The results were similar to x1800xl's, the end clock speed ending up 600+/almost 700 iirc. You know how XL's clock, i'm sure.
So in essence, yes, it overclocks well, and I do remember the site being amazed by the performance improvement through overclocking. I still don't get how 2.0ns chips can hit 1.4ns speeds if there is a speed bin in-between for cards like nvidia's 7800gt/gtx that you would think use that supply...but i've seen quite a few cards with the newer, slower, chips hitting the same approx speeds as the old ones with 1.4ns, and i'm not complaining. ;)
I'm sure with the overclock or ATiTool soft-vmods this thing would be killer, especially with better cooling than the known-for-sucking XL stock cooler.
Shadowmage - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link
What I'm curious to know is whether the AIW can overclock to roughly XT/XTX speeds.What type of RAM does the AIW use?
Zebo - Saturday, February 11, 2006 - link
Agreed. How can AT not include this? Lame.DigitalFreak - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link
Although I appreciate the DVD decoder tests, how is this review related to the AIW features of the card?highlandsun - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link
I would have been more interested in seeing how well it handled H.264 decoding at 1920x1080p.oxid - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link
does the 7800 gt use another video processor then the GTX? because in the last review with the HQV tests the 7800 gtx scored better then the gt in this review...mpeavid - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link
You guys need to use the exact same frame as an example for all cadence tests. Not doing so can invalidate your test.