Why do Fermi cards have bad video quality?

[SlickR12345]

Hi there. Why are the Fermi cards having such bad video quality?

source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hqv-2-radeon-geforce,2844-10.html

The article says that even the cheaper AMD cards like the 6570 can outperform the GTX 460 and GTX 470 easily.

So why do you think this is the case and is the newer GTX 560 better at video quality or same?

 

[Patrick Wolf]

You must've missed this part.

It’s important to note that the GeForce cards don’t suffer from shoddy video quality, and in our opinion, too many points are awarded for obscure multi-cadence detection... Realistically, if you put a GeForce in an HTPC for DVD and Blu-ray playback duty, you’d probably never guess that it didn’t achieve the top score.

In short, forget about it. You won't notice any difference.

 

[ViRGE]

Drivers. All the HQV tests they do poorly at are things that are post-processing effects, which in turn are done on the CPU & GPU via shaders. NVIDIA could do better if they wanted to.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3973/nvidias-geforce-gt-430/4

 

[Borealis7]

obvious troll is obvious.


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Moderator Idontcare

 

[SlickR12345]

You must've missed this part.



In short, forget about it. You won't notice any difference.

Does that mean that if i decode/encode a movie few times the quality would be unnoticeable.

and anyways i still don't undesrtand why nvidia decided for lower video quality than amd

 

[Throckmorton]

So if you don't use filters, it's not low quality?

 

[Dadofamunky]

balderdash


C'mon guys, either post constructively and contribute to the conversation by way of addressing/answering the OP's questions or just stay out of the thread. This is borderline thread-crap and you know it is not acceptable...

Moderator Idontcare

 

[Keysplayr]

What is going on in this forum......



C'mon guys, either post constructively and contribute to the conversation by way of addressing/answering the OP's questions or just stay out of the thread. This is borderline thread-crap and you know it is not acceptable...

Moderator Idontcare

 

[notty22]

Simple answer is TH found a test that can be run on video cards, and exposes a area in drivers where one company seems to have a 'problem' . Its happened before .
Windows 7: Radeon HD 5000-Series Cards Lack 2D Acceleration

 

[ginfest]

What is going on in this forum......

The anti-NV trolling and outright misleading thread titles are rampant :\
Or IOW "the inmates are running the asylum"


C'mon guys, either post constructively and contribute to the conversation by way of addressing/answering the OP's questions or just stay out of the thread. This is borderline thread-crap and you know it is not acceptable...

Moderator Idontcare

 

[darkswordsman17]

Keep in mind that these tests are also subjective. I've seen other sites rate the 460 quite a bit higher than pretty much all other cards including the 560.

 

[wahdangun]

yeah, amd always have better video quality than nvdia, i noticed it too with my 9500 GT vs HD 4650 in my HTPC computer,

 

[birthdaymonkey]

My own experience with video playback on NVIDIA products was very frustrating. From a post I made a few weeks ago:

Now that I've switched to a 6870, I'm really glad I did. I didn't realize how much a "minor" bug with my previous NV card was affecting my computing experience.

You see, I had an EVGA 460 768MB. After taking a long hiatus from computer games, SC2 made me decide to buy a decent video card again. It was the first card I bought to play games since I bought a Voodoo 3 3000 in 1999.

I was happy with the gaming performance of the 460, but its drivers were a mess for video playback. My computer is in my living room connected to an LCD TV, and the bulk of its workload is playing movies. The 460 had problems with jerky motion in DXVA playback, and it had serious audio sync issues with x264 content.

Using older drivers (or madVR for CPU decode) resolved the former issue but not the latter. The audio sync problem sort of drove me insane. I was constantly setting the audio delay manually in MPC-HC, trying old drivers and new betas, tinkering with my video filters, etc. Even though my new ATI card has no problem with audio sync, I'm still hyper-aware of it at all times... it sometimes feels like my cerebellum won't allow me to relax while watching videos for fear that the audio sync is off by a few ms.

Hopefully the paranoia will ease with time, but I don't think I'll buy another NV card any time soon. Even when I wasn't into gaming, I've always followed the hardware buzz. I'd heard people constantly talk about the inferiority of the ATI drivers compared to the NV ones, but my own experience has been just the opposite. The 460 was really quiet and ran cool with excellent game performance for the price. The hardware was nice, but the AMD drivers, at least as far as 2D goes, have been a lot better experience for me.

Perhaps I should have said "I won't buy another NV card again" but rather "I won't buy another one for use in a computer whose primary duty is video playback." I just received a GTX 280 from a friend (free since I was willing to bake it in an attempt to fix a pink screen of death problem), and so far it's a great gaming card.

 

[formulav8]

My own experience with video playback on NVIDIA products was very frustrating. From a post I made a few weeks ago:


Perhaps I should have said "I won't buy another NV card again" but rather "I won't buy another one for use in a computer whose primary duty is video playback." I just received a GTX 280 from a friend (free since I was willing to bake it in an attempt to fix a pink screen of death problem), and so far it's a great gaming card.

The only relevent post in this whole thread. Thanks for the info.

 

[RussianSensation]

Interesting.

I just upgraded to the 6950 from the GTX470 and one area where I still prefer the 470 is video playback. I even had to disable "de-noise" in Video Preferences for AMD's card because all the HD videos look washed out and blurry. Even my $20 GeForce 210 performed better to be honest.

So as has been mentioned, I wouldn't just blindly judge a card's video capabilities based on 1 test someone ran.

 

[SickBeast]

I'm very happy with the video playback on my GTX 460 in VLC. I don't understand what the fuss is all about.

Running a software decoder isn't a big deal for most of us anyway, if you don't like the quality of the hardware decoder, that is.

 

[evilspoons]

I'm not sure how older generations of nVidia cards compare to the newest ones, but the Geforce 9300 built into one of my mainboards does a fantastic job at decoding 1080p h.264 video under Linux (using VDPAU) for HTPC use.

Then again, I've never done a side-by-side picky comparison test. I'm the kind of person who'd be continuously frustrated by the bad details once I'd noticed them so it's likely for the best.

The computer has a Pentium Dual-Core E2100 (I think) that can barely play 720p in software decoding so it's definitely doing its job!

 

[Mopetar]

Interesting.

I just upgraded to the 6950 from the GTX470 and one area where I still prefer the 470 is video playback. I even had to disable "de-noise" in Video Preferences for AMD's card because all the HD videos look washed out and blurry. Even my $20 GeForce 210 performed better to be honest.

So as has been mentioned, I wouldn't just blindly judge a card's video capabilities based on 1 test someone ran.

Well the other problem is that regardless of which performs better on some arbitrary test, different people are going to prefer the different ways these cards playback the video. If you got 100 people and did a double-blind test to see which people preferred, you'd probably get mixed responses.

You could possibly ask people which they thought did a better job at getting closer to some reference point, but that doesn't mean they'd prefer it. Some people like things more washed-out and others like some over-saturation. Taste is subjective.

 

[SHAQ]

Title of the thread could use a change. It says it has "bad" quality and the article states most people won't notice. Only by some obscure measures and having both in front of you are you likely to notice. I don't see threads attacking TN panels because they are inferior to IPS panels. Why is that?

 

[taltamir]

noise and artifact reduction = optional post processing techniques used to "improve" a really bad video; does nothing for good video. This is not an indication of video quality.
I am pretty sure most video players don't even have those enabled by default. And any video converter you use would likely have a CPU version of each which, while slower, is higher or equal quality to the GPU based one.

 

[Lonyo]

Title of the thread could use a change. It says it has "bad" quality and the article states most people won't notice. Only by some obscure measures and having both in front of you are you likely to notice. I don't see threads attacking TN panels because they are inferior to IPS panels. Why is that?

Because TN panels are much cheaper

But yeah, this is a bit of a case of looking at the numbers/graphs and assuming they tell the (whole) story, or even a significant part of it, whereas in real terms they are pretty meaningless to most people.

 

[waffleironhead]

I think this part explains it best as to why the amd cards scored higher, even though both offer good video quality.

"Having said that, the Radeons earn a well-deserved win here. While obscure multi-cadence support might be responsible for the bulk of point advantage, their real strength is superlative noise-reduction options. This comes in real handy with compressed video, so if you plan to play back any files that aren’t optimally encoded at HD resolution, the Radeons have a real advantage."

 

[Will Robinson]

That...er this!:thumbsup:

 

[RobertPters77]

Ehh... I've had mixed experience with Video Playback on Nvidia cards. But Image quality in some Dx10 games was better on my 8800gts then on my 460.

 

[SlickR12345]

I'm glad the discussion is turning well and is taking the right path.

Hopefully we get more people post, possibly some1 with video cards from both camps like the 460 and 6850 or whatever who has done some encoding/decoding and write his experience with the quality of the videos.

I've also noticed another article on anandtech about the GTX 460 in which they say it has somewhat worse video playback quality, as it tends to blur some small parts of the image.