Motion video performance from CATALYST 5.13
This is the part of the web-wide article about the Avivo update package where ATI would like the hack to talk about HQV and the performance of the new CATALYST 5.13 display driver. I'll reluctantly oblige.Hollywood Quality Video is a benchmark from Silicon Optix that tests the ability of an video decoding and/or scaler subsystem to deal with troublesome interlaced video. Interlaced analogue video, such as almost all broadcast television and MPEG-2 delivered by DVD (which covers the vast majority of played back video on the planet), needs to be deinterlaced for show on a progressive scan display.
HQV tests a video processor's ability to detect and adapt to different cadences when deinterlacing (frame repeating to have it fit into a certain frame rate of the target, so displaying 60fps shot film on a 24.99fps medium) along with noise reduction, image enhancement and a couple of other things, all related to standard definition interlaced video.
The desire at ATI to be seen up there with the highest end video scalers and processors in expensive DVD decks means that, for a start, they have to do a bit more than detect 2:2 and 3:2 cadences. The variety of frame patterns in interlaced video means that there's a much larger list to detect quickly and adapt to. A good video processor will also adaptively deinterlace video based on the motion of objects in the video frames, and choose different deinterlacing methods to suit. The HQV benchmark deals with that, too.
ATI, at least when testing with HQV, now do a hell of a lot better than they used to, detecting awkward cadences (8:7, 5:5 etc) well and locking on to cadence switches faster. Their motion adaptive deinterlacing works for the HQV test and the final score is in the triple figures for all X1000-series boards.
So performance in the benchmark is up, and, nicely, that does seem to match up with much higher subjective performance in a bunch of low and high motion Hollywood film DVDs and Japanese anime disks (animation is a hard test!) that HEXUS threw at an X1800 XL, before and after installing the new display driver. CATALYST 5.13 is a seriously required download in the next week or so, if you own an X1K and display DVD video with it.
We'll do a SD and HD video love-in with a bunch of consumer boards in early 2006, as we get deep into the video thing on HEXUS going forward. Until then, the stuff I talked about here is pretty much working now, and NVIDIA have a big step up to make in the same area now.
So look out for a return to motion video performance here soon.
