HD video
While the first cards of any given generation are generally very poorly equipped for HD video, luckily AMD and Nvidia take the time to correct this point on the following versions. In this way, while the GeForce 8800 GTS/GTX/Ultra and Radeon HD 2900 XT are not very efficient in terms of the acceleration of HD video decoding, the GeForce 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3800 correct this defect. You may recall, AMD has the advantage of entirely managing VC-1 decoding in addition to h.264 while Nvidia does only completely cover the latter.
We measured the performances of the different solutions in reading two HD DVDs, one in VC1 (King Kong) and the other in H.264 (Babel). The test configuration was changed and was now based on a Core 2 Duo E6400. For software, we remained in Windows Vista and used Power DVD version 3104 and in version 3501 for the Radeon HD 3800 which is incompatible with the previous version.
The new cards live up to their expectations here.
We also took a look at video quality and based our evaluations on the analysis tests of the HD HQV suite (go
here for the details of these tests).
GeForce 8800s based on the G92 have the same behavior as the GeForce 8600 GTS. The rest of the GeForce line has problems with inverse telecine and doesn’t manage to reproduce these videos in high enough quality.
The 4 Radeon HDs obtained a score of 100, the difference being in terms of digital noise reduction. For Nvidia, this is activated with drivers in the control panel with a setting between 0 and 100 and set too high it can produce visual defects. We settled for 51%. Note that this test is subjective and that in some videos it’s best to be able to deactivate this effect when noise can benefit display of a movie. With the latest AMD beta drivers used for this test, you can also adjust the noise algorithm via Catalyst.
