NVIDIA Enables PureVideo on GeForce 6 GPUs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 20, 2004 1:22 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
DVD Playback Quality
Now that we've laid the background information, it's time to look at DVD playback quality. Although NVIDIA provided us with around 700MB of test data, we took it upon ourselves to put together our own test suite for image quality comparisons. We used some tests that have been used in the home theater community as de-interlacing benchmarks, as well as others that we found to be particularly good measures of image quality.
For all of our quality tests we used Zoom Player Pro, quite possibly one of the most feature filled media players available.
Our first set of tests are Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity tests. The Galaxy Quest theatrical trailer isn't flagged at all and relies entirely on the DVD decoder's algorithms for proper de-interlacing. The default image below is ATI's X700 Pro, mouse over it to see NVIDIA's PureVideo enabled 6600GT:
Hold mouse over image to see NVIDIA's Image Quality
NVIDIA offers a huge advantage here, the interlacing artifacts that are present in the ATI image are no where to be found in the NVIDIA image.
Next up we have The Making of Apollo 13 documentary off of the Apollo 13 DVD. Often times bonus materials on DVDs aren't properly encoded and trip up DVD decoders, let's see how ATI and NVIDIA fair here. The default image below is ATI, mouse over the image to see NVIDIA.
Hold mouse over image to see NVIDIA's Image Quality
NVIDIA once again takes the lead here; notice the combing artifacts on the man's suit coat, they are not present with NVIDIA's solution.
Our final test here is from the Making of the Big Lebowski off of the Big Lebowski DVD. The scene here is "The Jesus" licking a bowling ball, first let's have a look at what the scene is supposed to look at just before it transitions to another frame:
Hold mouse over image to see NVIDIA's Image Quality
Neither ATI or NVIDIA pass the Big Lebowski test, what went wrong here? The correct image above was generated by using a software decoder (DScaler 5) and forcing "bob" de-interlacing, which uses none of the data from the next field in constructing the current frame. The reason this works is because this particular scene causes most DVD decoders to incorrectly weave two fields together from vastly different scenes, resulting in the artifacts seen above. It's quite disappointing that neither ATI nor NVIDIA are able to pass this test as it is one of the most visible artifacts of poor de-interlacing quality.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
62 Comments
View All Comments
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
gordon151I should have made this more clear, I used the NVIDIA codec for NVIDIA's tests and I used ATI's codec for ATI's tests. I used Zoom Player for both of them.
ViRGE
They never briefed me on anything like that but I can always ask :)
Take care,
Anand
ViRGE - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
Thanks Crimson, but I'm talking about the video features, not the elusive cards themselves. ;-)crimson117 - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
#29: http://anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=23531ViRGE - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
I know this is an Nvidia article Anand, but could you get on ATI's butt about their lack of features too, and find out what's going on? When the X800 was launched, ATI was talking about decode acceleration for MPEG4 along along with some sort of encode acceleration(i.e. all the features NV promissed but never delivered on). I'm curious to know what happened to that, and if we're going to get something new out of ATI besides WMV acceleration.gordon151 - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
I was wondering why AT's results were different than PCPers and just noticed they used MMC & 4.12 while AT used the nVidia codec and player for both cards tests.Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
YtterbiumI've asked numerous times, never gotten a response. I'll try again :)
For those of you who are wondering, I have asked NVIDIA what their official statement is to early 6800 adopters, but that has also been met with no response.
Take care,
Anand
Ytterbium - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
I'm dissapointed that the encode function never made it, that was a killer feature. Any idea if it will come?Spike - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
Thanks for that! I have the BFG 6800 GT and on the BFG cd there is the nvDVD software. It's nice to know I can actually use the VP that I paid for!-spike
Gatak - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
Here are some examples of interlacing artifacts when redering on a progressive screen:1) http://moment22.mine.nu/interlace_1.jpg
Most software DVDs either blend or remove one of the fields by some partial de-interlacing algorithm. nvidia's DVD decoder does it ok. The image is sharp but still leaves only half framerate.
2) http://moment22.mine.nu/interlace_2.jpg
But in reality, half temporal resolution is lost. What should have been done is to render each field as a separate frame.
3) http://moment22.mine.nu/interlace_3.jpg
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, December 20, 2004 - link
SpikeI wasn't aware that the 6800s are coming with NVDVD, in that case you are good to go. Just download the updated version (1.00.67 is the official version) from the website.
Rand
The full system was configured as follows:
Intel Pentium 4 570J
Intel D915GUX Motherboard
2 x 512MB DDR2-533 DIMMs
Intel HD Audio Enabled
Windows XP SP2 w/ DX9c
Take care,
Anand