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ATI, nVIDIA graphics cards trump dedicated DVD players
Judging the quality of a moving image is an extremely subjective task, so it's with a little trepidation that we report on Hardware.Info's test which compared two graphics cards with twelve dedicated HDMI-enabled DVD players on the same Samsung 24-inch LCD monitor. The tests found that the PC -- which alternated between a ATI Radeon X1900XTX running Cyberlink PowerDVD 7 and nVIDIA's GeForce 7900GTX running the card's PureVideo software -- offered substantially better video quality than the DVD players, but here's where the subjectiveness comes in: the testers chose to rely entirely on the HQV benchmark DVD -- which requires a human to rate each test -- to discern the quality of the playback. The test was also exclusively based around the HQV DVD, with not a single "real world" test in sight. Unsurprisingly, the ATI / nVIDIA setups blew away the DVD players with scores of 118 and 93 respectively: the closest score from the dedicated DVD players was the Panasonic DVD-S97 at 68, which goes for around $250 online. The reviewers concluded that people should ditch their DVD players for media center PC based on the results of their image quality tests: a conclusion that some would take issue with, mainly because there are a dozen different factors other than image quality that can contribute to a good movie experience -- but it's interesting to note all the same.[Via Slashdot]
