Video Playback Quality

The HQV benchmarks from Silicon Optix are one of the few available methods of evaluating the playback quality of Blu-ray, DVD and HD DVD movies. They have one drawback, however. The tester’s perception is subjective while the notion of an ideal picture is rather vague.

We have been criticized for following the HQV HD test instructions too closely and giving out too low scores. The situation is different now: DVD video is so bad on Windows 7 with the CyberLink player that we can’t recommend using DVD.

Our experience suggests that video playback can improve or get worse both with DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

So, considering the subjective nature of this test, you should not view the HQV and HQV HD results as the ultimate truth.

Although DVD has become obsolete, not all modern GPUs can play that old format in high enough quality. As you can see, the Radeon HD 5700 series is not brilliant here: its major drawbacks are pretty low noise suppression and inability to display video with scrolling text correctly.

However, none of the tested GPUs could achieve the maximum score of 130 points. The main problems are the inability of the GPUs to smooth out the jaggies pattern and transform filmed content (24fps, progressive scan) into DVD or 1080i HDTV with the 3:2 pulldown method. Besides Radeon HD 5770, the whole lot of graphics cards proved unable to render text over video, which is totally unacceptable nowadays.

Standard-resolution video is dying out. TV channels in the United States are already broadcasting in 720p whereas HTPC owners are going to use Full-HD TV-sets with a resolution of 1920x1080. As a result, it is far more important to ensure high-quality playback of high-definition video.

As you can see, many modern GPUs boast exceptional quality of HD video playback (considering the problems with HQV HD + Windows 7 + CyberLink PowerDVD 8/9, we use data from earlier reports). In fact, nearly every mainstream and performance-mainstream GPU is very good at reproducing HD content. Unfortunately, the ATI Radeon HD 5700 series have poor results in the HD noise reduction test, which must be due to software flaws. Driver updates should resolve the issue.

Note that we are pretty liberal about the Film Resolution Loss Test - Stadium. ATI Radeon HD 5700 and other GPUs that received 10 points for that test had absolutely no moiré but had some slight flickering. Although it was barely noticeable in most cases, some graphics processors got 10 points for it. However, if you feel like fault-finding, you should subtract these 10 points from the total score because, according to the HQV HD instructions, flickering means 0 points.