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ATI vs. Nvidia in a Video Shootout

Posted by Zonk on from the blam-blam-i-hit-you-no-you-didn't dept.

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."

4 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Video on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What is the state of video on Linux?

    I would love to see a comparison of performance and video quality of these same cards on Linux. Do the drivers even support any of this functionality? Is CPU usage similar?

  2. Honestly by asv108 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I don't even look at ATI anymore when building a system for my own use. Nvidia has had excelent Linux device driver support for a number of years now. The last few personal systems I built were nvidia dualhead systems running linux, and I have never had a driver problem.

    My latest system is dualhead dual-dvi pci-express 7800GT system running on Ubuntu. I was expecting the video configuration to be a major pain the ass, but everything worked well.

    Until ATI has the same level of Linux support, I will not take their products under consideration.

  3. A counter point by lakeland · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While Nvidia's closed-source drivers are clearly better than ATI's, the opposite is true of the open-source drivers. If you are looking to build a system without binary drivers, or are using non-x86 and so cannot use the provided drivers, then you're better off going with ATI.

    I imagine this is no coincidence, how many people can be bothered working on the nv driver when the nvidia driver works so well... But it does worry me how easily we have come to accept binary drivers now that they work so reliably for 90% of the users.

  4. Re:VLC versus Elecard for HDTV by Xesdeeni · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yeah. Comparing 2-D playback of DVDs in 2006, is like comparing 3-D frame rates using Quake II...passe.

    Riddle me this Batman:

    1. Can the card accelerate MPEG-2 playback (DxVA, et al)?
    1.a. How much CPU is necessary to play back HD content (720@24p, 720@60p, 1080@24p, 1080@30i) without dropping frames?

    2. Can the card accelerate MPEG-4 (h.264 part 10) playback?
    2.a. How much CPU is necessary to play back HD content (720@24p, 720@60p, 1080@24p, 1080@30i) without dropping frames?

    3. Can the card accelerate WMV (VC-1) playback?
    3.a. How much CPU is necessary to play back HD content (720@24p, 720@60p, 1080@24p, 1080@30i) without dropping frames?

    4. Can the card accelerate MPEG-2 encode?
    4.a. How much CPU is required to get real-time encode (i.e. 1 hour of video takes 1 hour to encode)?

    5. Can the card accelerate MPEG-4 (h.264 part 10) encode?
    5.a. How much CPU is required to get real-time encode (i.e. 1 hour of video takes 1 hour to encode)?

    6. Can the card accelerate WMV (VC-1) encode?
    6.a. How much CPU is required to get real-time encode (i.e. 1 hour of video takes 1 hour to encode)?

    7. Can the card synchronize 1080i video with 1080i display (i.e. the field synchronization between the decoded video and played video don't drift - hint, neither ATI nor nVidia can do this today)?

    Xesdeeni