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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."
Oh, right, TFA.
... remember Moore's Law.
Surprisingly, the prices of these two cards are very close: ATI's X1800 XT & Nvidia's 7800 GTX.
I'm guessing that they used an X1800 XT with 512MB of GDDR3 while most 7800 GTXs only have 256MB GDDR3. They come to be about the same price but I attribute their release dates
Newegg has a great datasheet regarding all mainstream cards.
My work here is dung.
I thought that Nvidia had the edge because they are using the new fast subdivision algorithms of Jean Gallier at Penn CS dept.
but little is known that both companies are trying to stake their claim in the video market as well
Well, they do make VIDEO cards, don't they?
What I want to know is if ATI still wins under Linux. It is really cool to say that ATI has the best video playback, but if you are building a MythTV box, a test under Windows does not really tell you much.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
At first I thought big deal but then it accured to me that of all the people I know ( your typical family pc) the most common use is to download and edit pictures, and video. I am amazed how quickly a pc newbie user can become a proficient video editor with just a few tools. I'm sure it wont be long before they double or tripple the pc gaming market share. will be nice one day to see the prices of DV cards come down with the main streaming of things like firewaire and digital video for the common home user.
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
Many PVRS support linux and the number increases every year. Since this article deals with DVD/DIVX movies and not gaming, I would like to see some reviews with Linux drivers. Anyone have any experience?
http://religiousfreaks.com/Will it be possible to afford DvD's after buying one of these cards?
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
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.
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a =170327,00.asp
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
...brought to you by ATI
Russian web-site www.ixbt.com has monthly 3d video report featuring the newest NVidia and ATI cards as well as the newest drivers. See here. Although the text is in Russian you can still read the diagrams (like this) which they provide. They compare quality in games (provide screenshots showing bugs), performance and price.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
the author concludes that ATI's latest generation of GPUs have an edge over Nvidia
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?
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.
..but little is known that both companies are trying to stake their claim in the video market as well.
And both are going to fail prity miserably while they fail to provide serious technical information on their video capabilities. I've a need for H.264 *encoding* accelleration and video capture atm but trying to get information on the exact capabilities of cards (especially AVIVO) was a PITA. Sometimes the marketing droids would e far better beingg replaced by a technician.
Anyways, pity the article doesnt look at anyhing apart from DVD playback - to be honest, how high CPU utilisation is while playing back a DVD is a long way down my list of priorities when Im looking at buying upto 8 £400+ cards. How about capture quality, driver stability etc etc?
ATI having better quality video has been the case for the last 10 years. Even when they sucked at drivers when it came to games, their video was unmatched, both quality-wise and performance-wise (HW acceleration since 1997 with Rage Pro).
For non-gamer video enthousiasts there was never any doubt as to what card to get.
Read a DVD -> Reading a file -> Decrypting -> Decompressing -> Motion compensation -> YUV2RGB -> Deinterlacing -> Scaling -> Displaying on video device -> ATI X1800
There can be a separate component registered for each step. Or many. And DirectVideo can determine which one is the most appropriate for the given input, output, and hardware configuration. So if you video card supports hardware YUV2RGB scaling, then it will do it. If not, the software can.
The problem is partially that crappy companies get in the way. I downloaded a codec so I could view DV files, and it registered such that all video types were DV. This is a common scenario that requires a purely brain-dead programmer:
boolean IsThisTheProperCodecForThisVideoType?(string videoType)
// TODO: Look at type code and see if it is a DV file
{
return true;
}
ATi radeon 7000 through 9200 have excellent 2D and almost excellent 3D support from the open source DRI drivers. Any of the newer cards from ATi are lacking 3D accelleration under these drivers but have good 2D, although the driver that will enable 3D in these newer cards in under development and making rapid progress. nVidia cards have excellent 2D support from the opensource nv driver, but are completely lacking 3D support unless nVidia's ( not open source ) drivers are installed. When the nvidia drivers are installed, 3D accelleration will work perfectly. IMHO, ATi's drivers are not nearly as stable or powerful as nVidia's. nVidia has definitly got it won if you don't mind using non-free drivers, but if non-free drivers are a problem for you, you should probably go with an older ATi card.
Back in the day you could judge the quality of a video card by how fast it displayed the "stars" screensaver on windows 3.1 .. And the truly awesome rigs wouldn't skip every few seconds.
And you could also use the solitaire falling cards test. It actually used to take minutes for all the cards to fall after winning a game of solitaire.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Buying a windows machine for video encoding and DVD authoring is like buying a Mac for games.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
For those of you wondering about linux drivers - ATI's fglrx linux driver works fairly well (I use it to play HD .ts files on a Radeon 9800 pro). The only problems are lack of support for xvmc, and some problems with dual head (confusing config, xinerama issues). I don't have any performance issues with full bandwidth 1080i content and 5.1 sound running on a 720p display (video de-interlaced with mplayer's halfpack filter).
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All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
I downloaded VLC to play HDTV video clips that I downloaded from my cable box via firewire and I was not able to get it to play the clips without dropping a signficiant amount of frames; however, Elecard MPEG Player was able to play the clips without dropping frames. So it seems as though VLCs codecs are not as efficient as others. The details are 720P/60FPS video on a Athlon64 3200, 512 MB RAM (Single Channel), with an AGP-8x PNY GeForce6600 (256 MB). I may not have had something configured right on VLC, but I fumbled around for hours trying to get it working.
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.
The author of the article concludes with this ridiculous statement:
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.
A few observations, as someone who has done extensive programmatic work for digital video in windows:
By no means is Microsoft saintly or innocent (far from it), but it seems to me that they just can't win no matter how they play the game. The statement above is just looking for a quick target rather than addressing the real problem: people who are too dumb to make codecs that leverage a standards based playback architecture (it doesn't even have to be DirectShow--there are other architectures out there). DirectShow is a very developed, very extensive framework for processing audio and video, and it is solely the fault of people proliferating the market with excessive, buggy, redundant code that there are conflicting third-party applications.
Were MSFT to do anything to "fix" this problem, they'd have to further restrict restrict codecs in DirectShow, in which case the above author would proceed to whine about how MSFT doesn't allow third parties enough integration. Having your cake and eating it too? I think so.
2D quality on Matrox cards is outstanding. How come we couldn't get a comparison with on of their cards. I have a Parhelia laying around here somewhere but unfortunately it's not quite working anymore (the screen is a nice shade of pink).
Time makes more converts than reason