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Testing GeForce 8600 and Radeon HD 2600 in HD with HD-HQV
HD decoding enhancement and acceleration with the new mid-range graphics accelerators.
The newest recent mid-range graphics cards from AMD-ATI and NVIDIA have an extended and new video processing unit that can decode all the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD glory. We figured it was a good time to put some of the newer graphics cards to the test. We picked up a Toshiba HD-DVD player, seated it into a test system and started designing a couple of tests. As you might know, HD DVD is a new high definition video disc standard that delivers up to six times the image quality of standard DVD movies. HD DVD (and Blu-ray) is a major advancement over video discs in the same way that HDTV deliver superior image detail over standard TV.
Two items in today's test are important. Keep them in mind at all times:
HD AccelerationThe more your graphics card can decode the better, as it'll lower the overall used CPU cycles of your PC. We'll measure with the two most popular codecs used on both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies. VC1 without a doubt is the most used format, and secondly, the hefty, but oh so sweet H.264 format. We'll fire off a couple of movies and allow the graphics cards to decode the content; meanwhile like a vicious minx we'll be monitoring and recording the CPU load of the test PC.
HD Quality
Not only can the graphics card help offloading the CPU, it can also improve (enhance) image quality; as it should. So besides checking out performance of AMD's Avivo HD and NVIDIA's PureVideo HD video engines, we want to see how they effect the image quality, e.g. post-process and enhance the image quality of the movie.
To do this, we will utilize the popular HQV-HD test (www.hqv.com) developed by Silicon Optix.
Silicon Optix introduced the newly-released HD HQV Benchmark and provides Guru3D the tools required to evaluate the picture quality of various high definition products, including decoding quality of your graphics card. Like the standard HQV Benchmark, the high definition counterpart contains video tests and patterns that determine the quality of a products HD video signal processing. A set of five tests evaluate quality factors such as HD Noise Reduction, Video and Film resolution loss tests, as well a test for jaggies.
The tests will reveal enough to help us determine which products thrive as HD contenders; and expose the products that are HD pretenders.
Each test comes with a description and a few reference images, each difference or coherence accumulates to a certain amount of points. The tester compares these images with those seen on the screen and awards points. This test is partly subjective, yet when you understand the matter, can be extremely precise. The final result is the sum of all the HQV tests. The maximum possible number of points for HQV-HD is 100; and thus would be the perfect score.
But first let's have a chat about HD, PureVideo and Avivo.
