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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
I like NVidia products, & have been using them in the GeForce III, GeForce IV Ti-4600, & lately, a GeForce 6800 GT OC by BFG.
I am AGP 8x limited here, & cannot comment on newer vidcards than AGP type (i.e. - no PCI Express stuff has ever been tested by myself, first hand, to make judgements on them - I can only read many reviews & make judgements based on their findings, "vicariously" so-to-speak)).
On NVidia:
Overall? I am partial to them, because I am a regular 'fanboy' of IDSoftware's games (and, I'll 'admit that' right now), & they (Mr. Carmack our fellow slashdotter has stated it himself in fact) favor NVidia cards + drivers because they use OpenGL display methods which NVidia typically does better in than ATI.
Don't get me wrong - I used an ATI 9800 XT here thru 2003, just to see "how the other 1/2 lives" & it was a decent card, & ATI has 'cleaned up their act' in terms of OpenGL performance & also driver quality.
(E.G.-> For years, I noted that it was a "rumor/urban legend" that ATI drivers sucked, & they may have @ one point - in this industry + "Art & Science" in general with all of its API calls & hardware platform mixes of diff. componentry AND Operating System PLUS software mix permutation possibles? It's just a fact of life, & amazes me how WELL things tend to run, overall (even with the mad influx of malware/spyware/virus etc. in there as well, complicating things even more)).
One thing I have personally noted that ATI does FAR BETTER? Even though you may call me an NVidia fanboy??
2d display & refresh rates!
E.G. - The NVidia GeForce 6800 PCI slot GT OC by BFG I use here can pull off 75hz refresh rates (anything over 70hz iirc, is decent enough for your eyes vs. eyestrain etc.) @ 1600x1200 resolution using Full Color/32-bit color settings.
HOWEVER:
The older ATI 9800 XT I had? At those SAME resolutions & color ranges?? It could put out WELL over 100hz here on the same monitor & PC setup.
APK
P.S.=> There's really NO "perfect/best/overall better" piece of hardware out there of any kind (same with OS & softwares as well for the most part imo @ least really)... there's just ones that lend themselves to particular tasks better/more efficiently-effectively! apk
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.
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