ATI and nVidia crush high-end DVD players

Facinating review! Vey well done!

Could you please elaborate on which features are missing from the 6600gt that can be found in 7x nvidia cards? I currently have 6600gt's in my HTPC's and want to know what im missing out on.

Thank you.

Perhaps I missed it and I'm making myself out to be an idiot here but as far as I can see the author failed to mention the displays used in the test and how the dvd players and graphics cards were hooked up to those displays.

I would assume he used some kind of digital interconnect, mibby DVI for the graphics cards and HDMI for dvd players but then again he may have used component. What about the display? Were they all tested on the same screen? How were the signals output? 480, 720, 1080?

I'm most likely being pedantic but an enquiring AV geek would like to know.

All DVD players as well as both graphics card were tested with a Samsung Syncmaster 242 monitor (24 inch widescreen). All stand alone players were connected with a HDMI -> DVI cable and the graphics cards directly through DVI.

All DVD players were set to 480p output resolution, both graphic cards were set to 1920x1200@60 Hz, with the video windows at 1x magnification (no scaling).

For all deinterlacing tests on the standalone players the Samsung monitor was setup in 1:1 pixel mode, meaning that there was no scaling done by the screen.

So the scaling quality (or lack thereof) of both the players and the monitor was no issue in this test. Scaling is not something that can be tested with HQV, so we made sure it was of no influence to the results.

Thanks

Thank you for the write-up. I'm grateful for the internet's ability to connect the world to people with access such as yours. You make the world a better place for consumers.

Grazie. Danke. Thank you.

-Jack

Thanks for the review, very interesting stuff. I always wondered the reasons for spending thousands on something that you could buy for < $100 that works similarily.

One question I have is what software was used for your testing? The included DVD playing software or does it matter?

Thanks

In your conclusion, I really enjoy the sentence "We cannot appoint a clear winner from these tests, but we can say that a PC can be seen as a worthy replacement for a DVD player." A PC that CAN BE a worthy replacement is total appropriate. While I would very seldom use a PC to watch DVDs on the big screen, I can somewhat relate to lower budgets trying to find an all-in-one solution to save money. My experience with nVidia's PureVideo has been nothing less than spectacular. I can definitely tell the difference between it and mid and high end DVD players. Yet, spending only a mere $55 for a 7300 series card is very nice when you consider how well the reproduction is. ATI's AVIVO is nice also, but my experience was somewhat less pleasing than with PureVideo. Overall good review. I have read other reviews that out-right say these software solutions absolute beat out hardware solutions. Many times it has brought sickness to my stomach reading their reviews. Keep up the good work and perspectives.

For nVidia we've used their own PureVideo decoder, version 1.02-223 (link). For ATI we've used the decoder from Cyberlink PowerDVD 7. In both cases we've used Windows Media Player for playback.

Personally, I watch DVDs on my computer only. I have two reasons for that, one is I don't have the space to place a (second) large enough screen purely for DVD and TV only. The second reason is I have a 16:10 screen and my Harman/Kardon DVD player scales the image in the wrong way, either filling my whole screen by stretching the picture or (in 4:3 mode) surrounding the picture with black bars all around. By the way, I'm using nVidia's PureVideo decoder on a 7600 GT.

These pages should help:

Nvidia Product Comparison
http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

Nvidia Features & Benefits
http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041215177473.html

That answers everything.

Thank you.

The dvd players that you listed aren't really considered high end. They are more low to upper mid-fi.

Esoteric or Cary Audio make high-end dvd players.


Still, very interesting read.

I don't know those brands you mention, but what I do know is even if those high-end DVD players will (out)match ATi and nVidia it would still be more interesting to pay $1.500-2.000 for a complete Media Centre PC in my opinion. Considering the most high-end player tested is already worth $2.000, I'd rather buy myself a good all-in-one box which even gives me the ability to schedule and record TV programs (PVR).

Then again, people who are willing to spend those ammounts of money on a really high-end dvd player, probably don't care about 'some silly Media Centre PC'. I guess a Media Centre PC is just the best of both worlds, but can't replace either of those worlds.

Frankly you should've tested against the OPPO-971HD and other "real" quality DVD players. As it stands now, it's a bit of a straw-men beatdown.

If I may quote the article: Although the article doesn't say anything about dvd players with scores ranging from 100-130, it does give us an idea how difficult it is to reach such scores.

I think it would be nice to give one or two real high-end players a try just to see how much they can keep up with ATi and nVidia. But then again, this test is very well balanced in terms of what the average consumer will buy. If we're looking at those high-end dvd players (even the most expensive ones in this test), realistically you can say only 2-3% of all consumers will buy those expensive devices.

Hi,

Thanks you for a very good article.

Im myself considering to buy a X1300 for my htpc. In the article you state:

"A cheap X1300 will perform exactly the same as a more expensive X1800 or X1900. ATI themselves however state that the X1300 will not be fast enough to accelerate H.264 in the highest HD resolutions, a statement we will put to the test in the future."

Im a bit curious what the "highest HD resolutions" may be? is that 1080p or 1080i you are referring to? My goal for the htpc is to be able to play 720p and dvd really so if the X1300 (AGP) can cope with that im just fine. (I got an old P4HT 2.4 im turning into a htpc)

Thanks

Thanks for the excellent information. Would I achieve the same result on a plasma display compared to your lcd display? Thanks again.

We just tested the ATI All-in-wonder X1900. It could not pass the 3:2 test(film detail) in HQV. I did the driver update before the tests. Should we change some settings of the video card? Any comments are welcome.

In theory you would, as long as your able to drive the plasma with the proper resolution. The problem with many plasma screens is that they don't have square pixels (i.e. a 1024x1024 resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio) which makes it hard to get a nice picture from a PC. Most ideal would be to use exactly the resolution of your plasma of LCD tv.

You should open ATI's Catalyst Control Center, go to the video tab and tick the '3:2 Pulldown' checkbox. Then it should work. Also make your that you use a relatively modern MPEG2 decoder that uses GPU accellerator (i.e. a new version of PowerDVD or WinDVD).

I'm not sure if I fully understand. You said the DVD players tested were set to display @ resolution of 480p. However, don't "upconverting" dvd players display images at higher resolutions (ie 720p, 1080i, or 1080p)? and with these dvd players (im not sure if any you tested are upconverting rather than just progressive) would they not perform better? with sharper pictures? I guess I just don't fully understand, any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Hi there. Thanks for a thought invoking article. I do not know if you are still answering questions on this thread but it's worth a shot.

From my viewpoint it seems this test is conducted in a rather dubious way. I might be misunderstanding but these are my thoughts:

1. RESOLUTION
- Standalone players tested at 480P which is a resolution of 704x480 (or 720x480)
- PCs are tested at 1900x1200 where the player scales the dvd resolution to a resolution higher than that of High Definition (almost three times the standalone players).

Shouldn't PCs have been tested at 1280x720 and standalone players at 720P for a more comparable testing?

2. TESTING
- On many tests you rate the PCs a full ten. To what are you comparing when giving the 10 rating? Is it a ten compared to the $4000 Denon player that scored 130? When getting a ten is the PC doing the exact same quality, a little less or even better than the $4000 Denon player?
- Where are the screenshots from standalone players for comparison?


I wonder about this because I have a four core computer with a 7300GT graphics card and a 23 inch high quality LCD screen (1900x1200 resolution). This should be a very good DVD playing device according to your testing. I actually agree on that. It is very good...

... BUT when comparing to a Denon DVD3930 (my experience of a "mid-high-end" DVD player) - even connected to a much bigger 32 inch LCD, the DVD3930 blows my computer away by a very large margin. DVD3930 costs around $1700 and it's quality is breathtaking and much much better than anything I've seen from my computer and especially when it is upscaling to 1080P. When upscaling to 1080P it does a better job than most HD tv content I have seen. This is why your results do surprise me quite a bit.

Thanks again and I hope you find the time to answers these questions.

I totally agree. Upconverting the image will only magnify the imperfections. Personally, I like the choice of having an upconverting dvd player, but I know in my mind that upconverting is a gimick (marketing trickery) to extend the life of the dvd generation new sales. Everyones eyes are different. So, being able to distinguish from a normal 480p image to an upscaled 720p has been difficult for me on sub $300 dvd players. My experience has been (alot of) dvd players in the mid and upper price ranges $301 and up get by nicely without upconversion, so long as they are progressive players.

The problem for me watching dvds on a pc is the cpu is also busy doing other tasks. While these tasks may only take a small amount of cpu usage, none the less it being used. Unless your using a Cell processor and one of the SPEs is dedicated to MPEG-2video decoding your processor is having to do several tasks at once, even on multicore machines. Have you ever noticed a freeze or break in play when the computer has to do something intensive? This is very distracting.

What about audio quality?

An interesting comparison, but it's a bit premature to conclude that a media PC can compete with a high end DVD player without first testing audio quality.

High end DVD players have an analogue power supply, while all PCs have switch mode. I suspect this factor alone would allow any high end DVD player to trounce any PC in terms of audio quality.