As we already saw, these criteria are only important if you plan to watch media other than Blu-ray or HD DVD or do not possess a Full HD 1080p screen. If you do own a Full HD 1080p screen and are only interested in watching films that are already in 1080p, go directly to the next page. In all other cases, the graphics card will have to a lot of important post-treatment, resizing and de-interlacing, etc.

The quality of this work such as which is measured by the Silicon Optix HD HQV benchmark varies enormously from one card to the other:

The best three are the HD 2900 XT, the Geforce 8600 GT and the HD 2600 XT. Next is the Geforce 8800 GTS and finally the HD 2400 XT way behind in last.

The results are surprising. We were expecting perfect results from these new cards but no, they all failed the last inverse conversion test. Most surprising yet is that the Radeon HD 2400 XT seems to be far less efficient than its predecessor HD 2600 XT. It got a very poor overall score.

We have no explanation for this bad performance as on paper, both of them have the same capacity. A driver problem? It is possible since our HD 2400 XT would only work with the Catalyst 7.6 beta. However, we didn’t notice a difference in returns between its old drivers and the latest catalyst 7.7 with the HD 2600 XT here again. On the side of 100% non-HD cards, the contrast is shocking between the Radeon HD 2900 XT, which obtained a perfect score, and the Geforce 8800 GTS, which barely reached the average. That, at least, is something that will be of interest to gamers who also want to take advantage of HD video. Keep in mind though that all these results are susceptible to radical changes with the release of new drivers and/or reading programs.