There are three primary aims to our tests: • To determine whether Avivo or Purevideos give the best acceleration. • To determine whether Avivo or Purevideos give the best post treatment quality • To determine which is the normal configuration to properly watch a HD film

To do this, we have measured the occupation rate of the CPU during the lecture of HD DVD films. Two films were used: Swordfish, compressed in VC-1 and the Interpreter, compresses in H.264. Both presented an average of 20 Mb/s to 25 Mb/s as do most of the titles presently available.

We also used Silicon Optix benchmark HD HQV. It’s the HD version of the same test we used during "ATI VideoShaders - NVIDIA PureVideo". It allows us to measure the effectiveness of the GPU’s post-treatment functions, and most of all its capacity to reduce noise and de-interlace a video. However these criteria won’t concern you if you just want to watch 1080p HD movies on a 1080p screen. In this unusually specific case, there is no need for interlacing and no scaling.

The cards we tested are the following: ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro, XT, 2600 XT GDDR4, HD 2900 XT and Nvidia Geforce 8600 GT and 8800 GTS 320 Mb. The last two were slightly over clocked versions of the MSI factory. The 8800 GTS 320 Mb OC is clocked at more than 15% for the GPU and 6% for the memory. Although, this doesn’t really have any influence on the use of the processor.

We carried out our tests on two different systems. One single core, with Athlon 64 3800+ socket 939 (2,4 GHz) and 1 Gb of DDR-400. The other a dual core, with a Core 2 Duo E4300 (1,8 GHz) and 2 Gb of DDR2-667. Both were tested on the 32 bit integral Windows Vista edition.

The drivers used are Catalysts 7.7 for the Radeon and the Forceware 163.11 for the Nvidia. Finally we used the ultra PowerDVD 7.3 (equipped with the 3104 patch) to read the videos. This program is one of the only available that supports both the Avivo and the Purevideo.

Some little problems

We encountered some problems with the ATI cards. Our Radeon HD 2400 Pro was obviously bugged and did not manage to display any of the videos that we tried to open with it. According to MSI (from whom we got the card) this is most likely due to an error in its BIOS. (note : it is an A14 revision of the RV610, so the normal revision).