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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?
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
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.
...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
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.
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;
}
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).
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
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.
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
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