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Testing HD 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 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.

** Update - 17th July 2007. Yesterday NVIDIA provided us with internal Beta test-drivers. These drivers open up a can of joy for sure. We quickly put a GeForce 8600 GTS to the test and without a doubt the final score is a 100 points. The HD Noise reduction however is a little tricky, while it enhances the noise there also seems to be a residual side effect that i need to look into. Until that is solved I'm deducting 5 points for HD noise reduction.

You can adjust the level of Noise reduction though. But I can tell you that the 8600 series will score a near perfect 100 points in HQV-HD.

Once this driver branch is released to the public I will update the scores and re-do all tests in an updated article.