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Graphics Software Hardware

ATI vs. Nvidia in a Video Shootout 182

Posted by Zonk 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."
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ATI vs. Nvidia in a Video Shootout More

ATI vs. Nvidia in a Video Shootout

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  • Forget Something? (Score:3, Informative)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:10PM (#14610030) Journal
    Oh, right, TFA [extremetech.com].

    Surprisingly, the prices of these two cards are very close: ATI's X1800 XT [newegg.com] & Nvidia's 7800 GTX [newegg.com].

    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 ... remember Moore's Law.

    Newegg has a great datasheet [newegg.com] regarding all mainstream cards.

  • New algorithm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 2.7182 ( 819680 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:11PM (#14610035)
    I thought that Nvidia had the edge because they are using the new fast subdivision algorithms of Jean Gallier at Penn CS dept.

    • Re:New algorithm (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Feminist-Mom ( 816033 )
      I heard that too on a CAGD newsgroup, but I think it is still in negotiation. Gallier's work is interesting though - here is his webpage [upenn.edu], which has all of his articles.

    • Re:New algorithm (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:22PM (#14610147)
      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
      • 2D "quality" is now largely unimportant. If you want the best quality display, you use a good LCD display with DVI - and the Silicon Image TDMS transcoders that NVIDIA cards use are just fine.

        • Re:New algorithm (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          "2D "quality" is now largely unimportant." - by RzUpAnmsCwrds (262647) on Tuesday January 31, @03:55PM (#14610450)

          Well, considering I spend a good 90% of my time on PC's in 2d Explorer Windows shell display (even though I like to game, I work coding during the day & spend MOST of my time web-surfing for technical info. here @ night to try to stay ontop of the change in this field) @ both home & work?

          I consider 2d display important, & especially vs. eyestrain & from what I understand, the hig
          • First of all, I just love tinitron displays for the picture they produce, esp. for gaming (black level and variable refresh with vsync), video (black level, variable refresh with vsync, 'analog scaling' and depending on your display, native interlaced video) and graphics work where it is important that colors on your screen get as close to 'real' as possible. I have a small collection of them from 15" upto 30"

            For heavy text editing and the like however I really do prefer a large TFT screen.
            Why? all the thin

      • Re:New algorithm (Score:3, Interesting)

        by aaronl ( 43811 )
        Everything since the GeForce FX series cards can do 2048 × 1536 at 85Hz
        The GeForce 2 could do 2048 x 1536 at 75Hz
        The RIVA TNT could do 1600 x 1200 at 85Hz

        Your NVIDIA board has dual 400MHz RAMDACs, and that ATI card had dual 400MHz RAMDACs, so they have the same sync capabilities. If you can't push higher than you are, it's because your *monitor* can't sync at that frequency. Many monitors won't do 1600x1200 at over 75Hz.

        It also wasn't urban legend about ATI's drivers being terrible. They still have

        • Re:New algorithm (Score:3, Informative)

          by MP3Chuck ( 652277 )
          You don't have to use the Catalyst Control Center ... AFAIK you have all the same control with the normal one. Just, when you update your drivers, download the standalone driver install and the standalone Control Panel install.
      • I always WANT to like ATI because they provide much needed competition for Nvidia. However, I had a 9600XT when HL2 came out and had nothing but trouble with the drivers. I know that some people don't, but for me, I'm sticking with Nvidia because I've had such a bad drivers experience.

        (Crashing, kludgy drivers, settings not staying during games, etc.)
  • anyone care to post the bottom line, i.e. for someone building an SLI system, ATI or nVidia? Isn't that what it's all about in the end? Bottom line?

    • Re:bottom line? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The bottom line is strickly dependent on your bank account and more importantly how suseptable your friends are to rig bragging.

      Both ATI and Nvidia do their jobs very well, and the quality both offer is great.

    • Re:bottom line? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Andy Gardner ( 850877 )
      Jeez, you didn't even have to RTFA

      the author concludes that ATI's latest generation of GPUs have an edge over Nvidia

    • ...anyone care to post the bottom line, i.e. for someone building an SLI system...

      If you're building an SLI system and you want to take advantage of the SLI enabled cards, you're going to have to stick to Nvidia's line of cards [newegg.com] that currently utilizes the bridge accross two cards. To my knowledge, these are the only cards that will allow a user to use SLI to bridge them, hook up one monitor and enjoy the cards alternating on computing frames in a coordinated effort to make your view full of gooey warmn

  • Really? (Score:3, Funny)

    by m93 ( 684512 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:14PM (#14610069)


    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?
    • but little is known that both companies are trying to stake their claim in the video market as well.

      Yeah, I would have never guessed that with all the hooplah that ATI has been drumming up over their recently introduced AVIVO technology (h.264 support). Seems to be a bit pre-mature to me though since many know or have heard that Nvidia is on track to releasing an updated driver to add similar speed benefits.
  • 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.

    • Re:Remember When (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Eightyford ( 893696 )
      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.

  • video editing the new war (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Brigadier ( 12956 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:17PM (#14610098)

    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.

    • I am amazed how quickly a pc newbie user can become a proficient video editor with just a few tools.

      We're just a few years from the point that people can make distribution-quality movies [with distribution-quality soundtracks] from the comfort of their own garages.

      Then we can forget once and for all about Hollyweird & the over-arching agenda they try to shove down our throats [Heath Fudger eating pudding, Filthy Seymour Hoffman eating Andy Warhol, etc etc etc].

  • Thanks for the link!

    (Preventing a /.'ing are we?)

  • ATI wins & Codecs lose (Score:5, Insightful)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:19PM (#14610123)
    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 [omiod.com] to see most of them. There has got to be a better way than this Codec conundrum.

    • Re:ATI wins & Codecs lose (Score:4, Informative)

      by zerocool^ ( 112121 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:26PM (#14610194) Homepage Journal

      2 things:

      1.) Get VLC. Comes with almost every codec on earth installed, and is lightweight, and doesn't look like the abortion that is windows media player. Yes, this includes DVD codecs. The first rule of fight club is...

      2.) 2 months ago, Maximum PC concluded the opposite - that ATI's graphics, which everyone had always assumed looked better, in fact looked bad. I'm sure this conclusion about which is better changes monthly.

      ~W
      • 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

        • Re:VLC versus Elecard for HDTV (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Xesdeeni ( 308293 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @04:52PM (#14610977)
          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

      • Re:ATI wins & Codecs lose (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        2.) 2 months ago, Maximum PC concluded the opposite - that ATI's graphics, which everyone had always assumed looked better, in fact looked bad. I'm sure this conclusion about which is better changes monthly.

        I recently upgraded from a Matrox G450 to an ATI Radeon 9250 (with a 20" Diamondtron display). I'd always heard that Matrox excelled at image quality, but I was never quite sure if this was true, or advertising, or urban legend, or rationalization ("it's lousy at 3d, so it must be good at ...").

        The spee
      • I downloaded VLC just yesterday to try it out, and frankly the image quality SUCKS. even the stock windows media player that coame with windows 98 etc does a better job at deartifacting.

        sure VLC has a bunch of settings, that don't work unless you turn them on in the title menu... so what do people wwho made dvds with out title menues do? what if i made a captioned 'home video' with no menu? stuck using default Crappy settings in VLC. because changing settings during playback causes the subtitles/captions t

        • vlc might be good for you, but frankly i think i'll stick to a player that can actually handle things like improving the image quality Automatically.

          There's no such thing. It's not possible.

          This is something I hear constantly. There is no such thing as "improving image quality". You can't do it.

          The best image you'll get is the origional. You can't add accurate information to it. Any information you add is extrapolated. You can't "make it look better" by "smoothing things out". That just means bluring
    • Sure they could solve the problem. They could mandidate you use only Microsoft codecs. Problem solved. However if you want things open, such that you can choose what you like to use, well that means that people are free to make as many codecs and variants as they like. It sucks, but what are you going to do?
    • There is a Korean player called GomPlayer which organizes all the codecs together and auto detects and installs new codecs...

      Of course that would be too easy.

  • Linux Driver Reviews?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gasmonso ( 929871 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:21PM (#14610141) Homepage

    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/ [religiousfreaks.com]
    • If you're using the vidcard for a PVR, do *not* buy ATI. I made the mistake of doing just that and so far I've had to deal with bugs upon bugs with the fglrx driver that the ATI devs just seem to ignore, all the while adding new features like suspend and even listing "rss notification of driver updates" as a feature.

      Tv out is broken. The tv positioning control hasn't worked for close to a year now. 2d accel performance lags far behind the open source "radeon" driver. I'd love to switch to the radeon driver
      • If you're building a PVR, stick to a generic tv tuner card. ATI rage theater chipsets are not usually supported (AIW, etc) in most open source operating systems. Something more generic will work almost anywhere (even *BSD).

        In general, nvidia cards are better in open source operating systems in part because nvidia actually writes drivers for linux, freebsd, and solaris to some degree (now oss). I love ati cards, but my love of BSD trumps that. I do have to say the fx 5200 card i bought looks great on the
        • He's probably using the ati card just for output, and I speak from recent experience that the ati drivers suck, and the nvidia drivers rock. It's such a stark contrast there's just no comparison. If your kernel sources are in order nvidia's stuff just plain works. After screwing with the flgx driver on a friends machine (with several very tricky hacks and patches needed along the way), we finally gave up and went back to the oss driver (which is still tricky to get working, but we cheated and pulled the xor
        • not sure about the generic TV card comment.

          I'm a bit of a hauppauge wintv PVR x50 fan... because of it's pretty universally supported by 3rd party PVR applications, and the hardware MPEG2 encoding makes for low cpu usage during recording.

          E.
      • I second that. Had a very similar experience. I will never buy ATI again.

  • Excuse me, question in the back. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kesch ( 943326 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:23PM (#14610155)
    Will it be possible to afford DvD's after buying one of these cards?

  • *YAWN* (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:25PM (#14610176)
    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.
    • Why is it that every graphics card posts has to have at least ten of these posts? Not everyone is like you.

      Your 6600 performs massively slower then a 7800gtx or even a 6800gtx(or ultra or whatever the high end of that generation was called). You might be fine with it but there are those with more money that care a bit more about graphics quality.

      Then there are those like me who don't need even a 6600, i run my games fine with an old radeon 9500. That doesn't mean i can't imagine those that may want to ru

  • This article... (Score:4, Funny)

    by MorderVonAllem ( 931645 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:28PM (#14610210)
    ...brought to you by ATI

  • More benchmarking (Score:5, Informative)

    by igny ( 716218 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:30PM (#14610230) Homepage Journal
    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 [ixbt.com]. Although the text is in Russian you can still read the diagrams (like this [ixbt.com]) which they provide. They compare quality in games (provide screenshots showing bugs), performance and price.

  • Video on Linux (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:33PM (#14610260)
    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?
    • I'm using an NVIDIA card on my Linux box at work for some real time graphical stuff. The off screen buffering stuff we're doing was a bear to get working, but other than that it works great.

  • Honestly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asvNO@SPAMivoss.com> on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:37PM (#14610301) Homepage Journal
    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 [alexvalentine.org] 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.

    • Yea, I don't even care so much about Nvidia vs. ATI I want to see a list of all Nvidia cards ranked by performace. I mean everything from the old r128 to the lastes wiz bang 7800GT in order of crappiest (or oldest however you want to look at it) to newest. That way I can work out the price/performance of the one that I want and not worry to much about it.
    • I'll second that. I just bought a 9600 pro and the drivers were a pain in the ass to configure even though Suse 10.0 is supported and doesn't seem to be fully performing on the graphics side of things. On my Xp partition the card is fine.
      My last card used Nvidia drivers and that one just worked.
    • I feel the same way. I look to see if a component supports Linux, then how well. I currently have no need for a component that does not support Linux, preferably support it well. Nvidia chipsets are my preferred choice and I also I don't even consider ATI products anymore.

      Granted, many of the denizens here are active to rabid gamers and any review of the hottest cards is valid grist for the mill here.

      As a Slashdotter, I'd be much more interested in seeing this comparison, especially with an emphasis on thei

    • A counter point (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lakeland ( 218447 ) <lakeland@acm.org> on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @04:23PM (#14610690) Homepage
      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.
      • That makes the decision a tough one.

        I chose to opt for nVidia recently because their drivers are acceptable, albeit a bit painful, and they have this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nv-tv-out/ [sourceforge.net]

        ATI provides tv-out support for their cards in their closed binary drivers, but it looks like nvidia is still more compatible with Linux with a wider range of their products.

      • Re:A counter point (Score:3, Informative)

        by mczak ( 575986 )
        No longer true unfortunately. ATI's R300-based cards have a reverse-engeneered driver (for 3d) and it gets worse from there, ati is apparently unwilling to release _any_ documentation for the X1xxx cards, so not even a 2d driver will be available anytime soon (the modesetting etc. is supposed to be much different with that generation (avivo) so good luck with reverse-engeneering that). (Not to mention ATI's binary linux driver doesn't support them neither currently, stating in some interview support for the

    • Re:Honestly (Score:3, Interesting)

      by apoc.famine ( 621563 )
      I've had a Radeon 9700 for a few years...the first 4-5 months it sat on my shelf, because the WINDOWS drivers were too poor for me to bother using it. At that time, I had far better performance from my Geforce3 Ti5 card. After 4-5 months had passed (and the price had dropped $50) I was finally able to use it, as they had improved the drivers. Still, it had far more issues than my Nvidia card had.

      Fast-forward a year or so, and when I was drawn into the dark side and installed linux, the ATI drivers were a

    • Re:Honestly (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kasar ( 838340 )

      Two reasons to avoid ATI.

      Drivers, or lack thereof. They've always been slow with new ones. I have a card now that they recommended I use two year old ones on since the current ones have issues with what I run. Apparently Radeons don't need optimized drivers on each chipset, they're interchangable...

      Quality. The fans on two cards I had died in a year. A fan is a rather minor thing, but to me it's indicative of the overall quality.

      Performance I won't get into, but even the older GeForce cards seem

  • Video capture? AVIVO? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MrBandersnatch ( 544818 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:38PM (#14610308)
    ..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?

  • What's new??? (Score:3, Informative)

    by ecuador_gr ( 944749 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:38PM (#14610311) Homepage
    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.

  • Not Microsoft's fault (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:40PM (#14610332) Homepage
    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.
    Yuck.
    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.
    This is an interesting statement, because the author just described exactly how DirectVideo works. Each step in the decoding process is a pipeline, and a "codec" can plug-in to this and provide whatever steps in the process that it can do best. For example, if playing a video looks like this:

    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;
    }

    • I've not used DirectVideo, but I've used DirectShow a bit (not for some time, however). Back when I used it, there was no good standard way of getting at hardware features. Basically, the hardware manufacturer had to provide their own versions of CODECs that made use of the features provided.

      What is needed is a set of functions for things like iDCT (for example - at the time this was about as much as most cards provided). If it is provided by the hardware, then it uses that, if not then it uses a soft

  • who cares about video encoding? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tibor the Hun ( 143056 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:49PM (#14610399)
    Buying a windows machine for video encoding and DVD authoring is like buying a Mac for games.

  • ATI Linux (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DaCool42 ( 525559 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @03:53PM (#14610432) Homepage
    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).
    • Can you provide some more details on how you are doing your de-interlacing? I haven't been able to make mplayer do it properly - VLC seems to be much better. Can you put an example command line here please?

      Thanks
    • I have an ATI card in my laptop (Radeon Mobility X300) and have to say its HORRIBLE. The fglrx drivers are incredibly unstable (and forget about composite), and they segfault when UT starts (apparently its a known bug with the fglrx drivers).

      Well at least I didn't have to get a third party utility to mod the installer for the linux ones like you have to for the windows ones. If you have a choice between ATI and NVIDIA (especially for linux), always go NVIDIA. My old GoForce 5200 performed better than the

    • Re:ATI Linux (Score:2, Informative)

      by Odddmonster ( 4778 )
      But the latest drivers don't allow the usual Xserver confiruations to be read. If you want to do any cusomisations (even simple ones such as modelines) don't bother with the ATI drivers.

      (BTW. For TV-out custom modelines are critical for a decent image, see if you can read between the lines).

  • Nvidia wins (Score:1, Interesting)

    by WhiteWolf666 ( 145211 )
    I run Linux.

    ATI has gotten better on Linux, but Nvidia vastly outperforms ATI on Linux.

    I would not recommend anyone purchase an ATI card for Linux usage, and I wouldn't commit to maintaining anyone's system if they have an ATI card.

    For 2D, or Video, they are okay, but they are severly lacking for OpenGL usage.
    • I too have had alot of trouble with getting good performance out of the ATI cards. I have an HP ZD8000 notebook, which comes with a x600 ATI card built in.

      I use the ATI provided FGLRX driver, but OpenGL never works right, and while the svideo output works well, i get dropped frames in full screen video.

      I assume there is some magical configuration that will get it working better, but i've already put more hours into tweaking my xorg.conf that I would have liked to.

      Of course, on the flipside, ATI works
      • The DRI drivers for ATi cards are significantly better than anything I've seen from ATi. Unfortunately, they don't really work with anything after the R200 series, since they don't have specs available. Someone in charge at ATi needs to realise that the DRI project has a lot more skill than their in-house driver team, and just hand over the specs. They probably don't because they'd be embarrassed when the DRI drivers were shown to be better than the official Windows ones...

  • When I last needed to buy a video card update, I basically got the card that had the highest performance/price ratio, which ended up being an ATI x700 card.

    Next time, it could be nVidia, or ATI again.

    Granted I am not as interested in the $800 video card solutions, but then, no game on earth actually leverages the performance of these cards. My x700 plays HL2 and Doom3 without a glitch, as well as actual graphics intensive games like Dungeon Seige 2 which actually grind my FPS to under 30fps. Since my moni
  • I've found that I can get absolutely insane performance with MPlayer on Linux.

    Athlon XP 2000+ 1.66GHz
    NVidia GeForce4 440 MX
    (NVidia driver, 2.4 kernel)
    MPlayer CVS snapshot (post 1.0pre7)

    With OpenGL direct rending, display of standard-def material averages less than 1% of the CPU time, and a very big speed-up on HDTV material as well. I could hardly believe it myself when I first noticed. Try it for yourself:

    mplayer -nocache -dr -vf scale,format=bgr16 -vo gl -nortc -framedrop -lavdopts fast

    It's quite funny
    • Yes, I get around 10% cpu use for xvid on a transmeta crusoe 866mhz (about as fast as a 400mhz P3) -- how on earth did they manage to get 30% utlization on a 3500+ AMD64!? - thats insane!
  • Based on this article, I'm still not sure whether or not I'd upgrade to anything anytime soon.

    Currently I'm running a Leadtek 6800GT on two Dell 2001FP monitors. I noticed that one of the monitors ends up going black for a moment with some screens, and refreshing afterwards.

    I did a little bit of looking into it, and believe that the problem is with DVI compliance on one of the video outputs. Tom's had a good article on it:

    http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/29/the_tft_co n nection/ [tomshardware.com]

    So my question u

  • With nearly every video card integrating VIVO feature, I have yet to see any site do an review of just how well VIVO function works on modern video cards.

  • Blame Microsoft?! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kidjan ( 844535 )
    Note: I do not represent the opinions of MSFT, nor do I speak on their behalf. The below is my opinion.

    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 dig
  • >> In short, Microsoft needs to seriously clean up this mess.

    Oh god please no. This needs a to be a well-designed OS-independent standard. Unfortunately Microsoft aren't capable of either concept.

  • What about Matrox? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Xabraxas ( 654195 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @11:34PM (#14613521)
    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).
  • This finally proves conclusively my theory, to wit:

    If you're looking for the best video card to buy at any given moment, all you have to do is ask me whether I have ATI or Nvidia, and then buy the highest-end model from the other manufacturer.

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