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ATI vs. Nvidia in a Video Shootout
ThinSkin writes "ATI and Nvidia are well known for hailing their products as leaders in 3D apps and games, but little is known that both companies are trying to stake their claim in the video market as well. ExtremeTech is featuring an article that tests cards from ATI and Nvidia to determine who takes the cake in video quality and performance. Using CPU utilization scores and visual quality comparisons during video and DVD clips, the author concludes that ATI's latest generation of GPUs have an edge over Nvidia, particularly in DVD playback and with video acceleration."
Clearly, ATI offers better video support in their latest graphics cards than Nvidia does...In really tough video scenarios, like those with odd cadence patterns or noisy DVDs, ATI delivers better quality.
If you want your video to look its best and run as fast as it can, you have to enable all sorts of settings in the advanced properties of your player (or players, plural), and those settings can be different between ATI and Nvidia cards. In short, Microsoft needs to seriously clean up this mess. Video codecs need to hook into a common framework, one that the graphics cards manufacturers can target for acceleration without needing to work with every individual codec maker on the planet.
Codecs are getting out of control, just look at this codec list to see most of them. There has got to be a better way than this Codec conundrum.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
In 6 months we will get an article virtually identical to this one. Wake me up when something special happens. The video card industry is a never-ending pissing match. While all these suckers spend $500+ on brand-new cards, I get a one-generation-old card for $150 that plays the latest games quite well. I got a GeForce 6600 a few months ago for right around $175 and haven't run into a game I couldn't play. Granted I can't run 4xAA at full resolution like the latest SLI setup can, but it is more than adequate.