ATI and nVidia Crush High-End DVD Players

[akrako1]

ATI and nVidia crush high-end DVD players
HQV benchmark shows the overwhelming quality of current graphics cards

http://www.hardware.info/en-UK/articles/am9nY2pqZA/ATI_and_nVidia_crush__2000_DVD_players/

[RabidDog]

excellent explanation of de-interlacing and its problems ... still not sure about a lounge living media PC tho .. too many compromises. Also its not really a graphics card vs Dvd player its a media centre pc versus a Dvd player which is a differnt bowl of enchilada.
Noise /speed /functionality/ start up/ reliability/ looks/ power consumption /cost... too name a few possible problems

[ZAPPER]

Hm. An interesting article on what I would have considered a given. (The given part being that a PC would have more versitility in controls over the image and more available GPU power for applying any controls)

What kind of suprises me is that a standard stand alone DVD player seems too not fare as well as I would have thought it should. That is, it would seem that a device that exists just to play DVDs should be able to meet the maximum performance range just by the nature of it being a DVD player.


It kind of leaves me wondering just what the differences are between a $200 unit and a $2000 unit. Different quailty electronics? I would have thought that on or off is the same no matter what the switch cost.

Hm, this may take some further review to settle my simple way of thinking.

[edDV]

Excellent article but he targeted this only to progressive (LCD and Plasma) displays at 1920x1200 VESA resolutions with 480/576i and 480/576p input and scaling turned off.

Next he needs to look at the effects of scaling (480p player upscaling in the HDTV vs graphics card scaling) including adding some upscaling DVD players to the pool.

Also he should be looking at the 1080i and 720p graphics card outputs to a normal HDTV for comparison. He is assuming a DVI or DVI to HDMI connection at VESA 1920x1200 thus avoiding the scale and reinterlace to 1920x1080i or scale to 1280x720p.

Then he needs to test these cards in 1080i mode to a 1080i HDTV set that most will have. In that case the card needs to scale an interlaced image 480i to 1080i or convert 480p to 1080i.

All the above is for 480i/480p normal DVD display. Next there is HDTV input which is another nest of snakes.