ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon X1900
Our Test System & HQV
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: 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 ECS KA1 MVP Extreme motherboard based on the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset, 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 ECS KA1 MVP ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CF Edition A-I-W Radeon X1900 Radeon X1900 XTX Radeon X1900 XT Radeon X1800 XT GeForce 7800 GTX 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 - OpenGL - |
Relevant Software: Windows XP Professional SP2 nForce Drivers v6.82 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA Forceware v81.98 ATI Catalyst v6.1 Benchmarks Used: HQV WMV HD Playback 3DMark06 v1.0.2 FarCry v1.33* F.E.A.R. Half Life 2* 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 number 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 total scores 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 X1900 using Intervideo's WinDVD 7 Platinum, with hardware acceleration enabled.
ATI has done an excellent job improving the video playback quality of the X1K family of products. When they were first introduced back in October '05, X1K cards scored in the high 30s in this test, which was well below what NVIDIA could do with the GeForce 7 series. But now, with the latest Catalyst drivers installed, ATI dominates in this test, breaking the 100 point barrier and besting NVIDIA by a wide margin.
