ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon X1800 XL
Our Test System & HQV
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested our NVIDIA based cards on an Asus A8N32-SLI nForce 4 SLIX16 chipset based motherboard, powered by an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processor and 1GB of low-latency Corsair XMS RAM. However, the ATI based cards were tested on an ATI reference Radeon Xpress 200 motherboard, but with the same processor and RAM. The first thing we did when configuring these test systems was enter each BIOS and load the "High Performance Defaults." The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest chipset drivers available, installed all of the other necessary drivers for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran the tests.
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Motherboard - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive -
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Hardware Used: AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (2.6GHz) Asus A8N32-SLI nForce4 SLIX16 chipset ATI Reference CrossFire MB ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CF Edition ATI A-I-W Radeon X1800 XL XFX GeForce 7800 GT 1024MB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board Western Digital "Raptor" 36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Video Playback - Video Playback - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 nForce Drivers v6.82 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v81.89 ATI Catalyst v5.11 Benchmarks Used: HQV WMV HD Playback 3DMark05 v1.2.0 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.04 FarCry v1.33* F.E.A.R. Half Life 2* Doom 3 v1.3* Quake 4* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo) |
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For our first test, we used the HQV DVD video benchmark from Silicon Optics. HQV is comprised of a sampling of video clips and test patterns that have been specifically designed to evaluate a variety of interlaced video signal processing tasks, including decoding, de-interlacing, motion correction, noise reduction, film cadence detection, and detail enhancement. As each clip is played, the viewer is required to "score" the image based on a predetermined set of criteria. The numbers listed below are the sum of the scores for each section. We played the HQV DVD using the latest version of NVIDIA's PureVideo Decoder on the GeForce 7800 GT, and as recommended by ATI, we played the DVD on the ATI All-In-Wonder X1800 XL using Intervideo's WinDVD 7 Platinum, with hardware acceleration enabled.
Both of the cards we tested performed similarly in the HQV video benchmark. The NVIDIA powered XFX GeForce 7800 GT pulled ahead by only 5 points, thanks to its better performance in one of the film cadence tests. What's interesting to note is that the GeForce 7800 GT technically doesn't have support for 3:2:3:2:2 cadence detection, but it was definitely enhancing the images during that test.
