VC-1 Decoding

Let's have a peek how well things scale with some more graphics cards included:

Here we see on HD-DVD the movie, 'The Bourne Supremacy'. This HD bitstream is roughly 25 Mbit/sec and higher is no exception. We notice that the movie is using a VC-1 bitstream.

Looking at the 8600 series however, we see that they keep your CPU nicely chilled.

H.264 Decoding

It took me a while to find a movie that was encoded in H.264 with a decent bitstream; but hey ... I ended up with the really lovely Pan's Labyrinth. It's an extremely harsh title in the sense that's it's encoded with h.264 yet still was showing a good 20 Mbit/sec (=2.5 MB per second); this is a hard thing to do for a any piece of hardware at 1920x1080.

Peek and be amazed.

Yes .. that chart looks messed up, but that's the reality, the numbers again represent CPU load on average. To your right you'll notice PowerDVD decoding the H.264 content over the CPU, a 2.9 GHz Core 2 Duo X6800 I might add; that's 40% CPU utilization for both CPU cores.

Then when you look at the Radeon HD 2400 XT, HD 2600 XT and GeForce 8600 GT and GTS you'll be shocked. The PC is literally doing nothing. The entire bitstream is being decoded and post-processed over the GPU's. Amazing stuff.

Testing High Definition Video Quality with HQV-HD

To test image quality we will use the newly released HQV-HD benchmark. 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 you determine which products thrive as HD contenders; and expose the products that are HD pretenders.

So we ruled out that HD acceleration really is not an issue for the tested cards. When we take a peek at HQV-HD things change and shift massively.

Each test from the benchmark comes with a description and a few reference images each accumulating to a certain amount of points. We as reviewers then compare these images with the one the screen displayed content and awards points. This test is partly subjective yet when you understand the matter, can be extremely precise and thus an excellent method of ranking the image quality of HD content.

The final score 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.

The 8600 series will score a near perfect 100 points in HQV-HD.