Media Performance is important to analyse as this will be a primary feature of the card so we started by analysing HQV results. We used a few other cards as comparisons with the HQV benchmark.
This HQV Benchmark from Silicon Optix are great tests of the playback quality of HD DVD, DVD and Blu-Ray movies. We used Catalyst 9.5 and Forceware 197.77 for our testing. It is worth pointing out that these tests are in some ways very subjective and are tied into not only the hardware, but the drivers. We have noticed some improvements lately with the recent Catalysts.
HQV Test |
Sapphire HD5550 Ultimate
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Asus Bravo 220
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Geforce 9800
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Geforce 9600
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Geforce 9400
|
Deinterlacing
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Color Bar/Vertical Detail | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
Jaggies Pattern 1 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
Jaggies Pattern 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
Waving Flag | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 0 |
Image Enhancement
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Detail Enhancement | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
Noise Reduction
|
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Noise Reduction | 5 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 |
Motion Noise Reduction | 10 | 5 | 10 | 10 | 5 |
PullDown Detection
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3:2 Detection | 10 | 10 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
2:2 Cadence | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
2:2:2:4 Cadence | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
2:3:3:2 Cadence | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
3:2:3:2:2 Cadence | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
5:5 Cadence | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
6:4 Cadence | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
8:7 Cadence | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
3:2 Cadence | 5 | 0 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
Mixed Film and Video
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Horizontal Scrolling Text | 5 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 5 |
Vertical Scrolling Text | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 5 |
Total Score | 116 | 106 | 111 | 111 | 85 |
Our results verify that the ATI solution really delivers a quality image with our HQV media testing, outscoring all the nVidia cards on test today.
Again the Bluray acceleration from the ATI solution is marginally better and although these results are quite close, with a lower specification processor the variables would increase.