Video Card Benchmarks for Media Scenarios
posted in Technology, Hardware |AnandTech published one of the two reviews I’ve been looking for today, comparing the video decode performance between the AMD/ATI and the NVidia GPUs. They key findings are that both of the one step under the top cards are the best for media scenarios- the AMD Radeon 2600HD and the NVidia 8600GTS. Comparing the two head to head the NVidia card has better video quality, especially “noise reduction”, although its unclear how much noise reduction you really want for any properly mastered HD content. The Radeon has better support for VC-1 decoding which is not supported in hardware n the NVidia card, but VC-1 (designed by Microsoft I think) is much less CPU intensive to decode in the first place- on a low-end P4 machine it was still only taking 30% CPU so the quad-core Q6600 I’m planning on getting should handle even multiple simultaneous streams of it with no problem.
The missing review is still the stability one. For a media-box, running for weeks without crashing or needing a reboot and without hangs or missed recordings is a key criteria. Maybe I shouldn’t be hoping for that driver stability review from the web-sites that tend to publish tons of over-clocking results, but its not like anyone else has really researched this yet either. I’m pretty convinced that there will be some big differences between NVidia and AMD on this stuff…