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The Verdict
It's impressive to see what today's cards are capable of when decoding, accelerating and enhancing HD content. Apparently our test-system in combo with PowerDVD does not have a problem accelerating HD content at all. Even if you wouldn't use the graphics card as accelerator. A PC with a Core 2 Duo E6600 for example would achieve a CPU load of roughly 30-40% during that decoding process. When we peek at VC-1 decoding there's definitely some gain with NVIDIA's PureVideo HD compatible products yet the Radeon Avivo HD in combo with a HD 2600 XT card was showing extremely impressive results. ATI is definitely the winner in this segment.
When we take a deeper look at h.264 decoding then literally ... there's no way I can describe you how well both 2400, 2600 and 8600 cards can cope with it. At certain intervals during the decoding stage we noticed a CPU load stage of 0% while it was decoding and displaying Pan's Labyrinth at 1920x1080i at a dope 20-25 Mbit/sec bitstream. Truly amazing, as when you disable GPU acceleration our CPU (C2D 6800- 2.9 GHz Dual Core) would show an average of 40% CPU utilization with peaks towards 50%. Amazing stuff, both AMD-ATI and NVIDIA have done a great job here.
We then move onwards to image quality. Now it's save to say that both mid-range competitors have excellent VPU's (video processing unit) in their new mid-range products. ATI kicked butt; NVIDIA's results however disappointed big-time. With the current drivers it's not post-processing the content as the way it's meant to be played back. We hardly spot noise reduction, and the film-tests where simply disappointing from a quality perspective, moiré effects everything was just not looking good.
But I assure you; over time NVIDIA's drivers will enable a better score and this yield a better result, and VC-1 although not fully accelerated really isn't a big issue as rumors claim. See they added new dedicated core logic (VP2) in their video processors, exactly for this stuff. The poor HQV-HD results however did raise my eyebrows as that was definitely a disappointment. I'm absolutely certain that NVIDIA will get this ball rolling though as we noticed exactly the same with the original HQV tests (DVD). It's all about driver development which for months now has been NVIDIA's biggest Achilles heel. On the other side, huge props to ATI-AMD though as from day one of the release they had this working perfectly.
So patience is a virtue here. Meanwhile, ATI's Radeon HD 2600 XT almost scored a perfect 100% on everything HD related. The 2400 XT is good, yet IQ wise is significantly less than that Radeon 2600 series.
** 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 near 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. 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 HD-HQV.
Once this driver branch is released to the public I will update the scores and re-do all tests. As a result of these findings I felt the need to alter the conclusion of this article. The two most perfect cards for HD decoding and enhancement will be the Radeon HD 2600 series graphics cards and thanks to the new VP2 core logic the GeForce 8600 series. Both series cards hit the jackpot image quality wise, nice !
