ATI shortcomings

With H.264 being the buzz among both NVIDIA and ATI, we decided to test the cards with some 1080i test patterns. Since the File Player from Multimedia Center refused to work on my system, I used Cyberlink PowerDVD 6 to view the high-definition clips. (ATI confirmed that the DXVA decoder was compatible with the new AVIVO deinterlacing).

HD Challenge: Deinterlacing

For the deinterlacing challenge, I used a test clip where a spinning bar is superimposed over a SMPTE resolution pattern. A good deinterlacer should be able to detect that the bar is spinning (and apply appropriate processing to those regions only). NVIDIA has always done well with this test, generating artifacts in the squares near motion only. ATI's Catalyst 5.13 brings their HD deinterlacing capabilities to a similar level. (Both ATI and NVIDIA still produce artifacts due to the size of the processing region).

HD Challenge: 3:2 Cadence

As the 3:2 cadence used for 24 fps represents the most important cadence, we wanted to evaluate how well the graphics cards did with HD cadence detection. This is important for watching movies that are broadcast in HDTV or those on D-Theatre. Likewise, it's not entirely clear if Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be recorded as 1080i or 1080p (remember, the supported output doesn't tell us what's actually recorded).

While both NVIDIA and ATI apply region-based motion-adaptive deinterlacing in high-definition, neither are able to appropriately detect the 3:2 cadence of our 1080i test clip.