The HQV Benchmark

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HQV stands for Hollywood Quality Video. The HQV DVD video benchmark includes a regular DVD with different scenes that present potential visual problems to a DVD decoder. Points are awarded if the decoder handles the problems so that viewers don't see them; points are not awarded if it doesn't do the job. In looking over our benchmark results, we immediately observed that the Intel and AMD processors scored the same, irrespective of their model numbers (and in fact, the results from both processors are pretty similar).

Rather than stepping you through the entire sequence of tests and explaining them in detail, we refer you to Don Woligroski's January 9, 2007, article for Tom's Hardware entitled Avivo vs. Purevideo, Round 1 wherein he walks readers through the whole shebang. Here, we provide a brief table instead that summarizes results for each vendor's CPUs with a one-liner explanation and remarks for each one. We need only observe here that each test (or sub-test, when a particular test involves multiple versions or iterations) produces a score (maximum scores vary), where the score indicates the degree to which the decoder can handle things perfectly.

Test Name Max. Score AMD Intel Explanation/remarks
De-interlacing colour 10 10 10 Able to show small colour bars flicker-free
De-interlacing jaggies 1 5 5 5 Looks for jaggies rotating a line in a circle
De-interlacing jaggies 2 5 3 3 3 small lines moving slightly within an arc
De-interlacing: flag test 10 10 10 Actual video of Old Glory flapping away
Detail enhancement 10 10 10 Enhance detail of blurry parts in video scene
Noise reduction 10 10 5 Ability to remove compression artefacts
Motion adaptive noise reduction 10 10 10 Ability to show motion with no motion trails of smearing artefacts
Film detail
(2:3 pulldown)		 10 10 10 Conversion of film to video, Intel got noted (but not dinged) for failing 2:3 pulldown detection
Film Cadence 40 25 25 Eight tests of 5 points each; pass or fail; tests for flicker or jaggies
Scrolling titles (horiz) 10 5 5 Looks for jaggies or artefacts in title text
Scrolling titles (vert) 10 5 5 Looks for jaggies or artefacts in title text
TOTALS 130 93 88 AMD edges Intel only in noise reduction

Overall, the CPU seems to make very little difference in the output of high quality video when everything except CPU and motherboard stay the same between builds. We have to guess this reflects the common graphics card more than differences among CPUs.


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