I've been setting up a new build using Arcsoft TMT for blu-ray playback, and I noticed something odd.
The video card is GeForce 8600GT-based, using DVI->HDMI to a Sony KDS-60A2000 SXRD rear-projection (1080p).
In BeyondTV, I was in the habit of setting my resolution to native monitor resolution (1920x1080 in this case), and using the overscan compensation in BeyondTV to fit to the screen. This gave me 1:1 pixel mapping in the past. OTA ATSC video looked great, with no softness or visible scaling artifacts. This still seems to work fine for BeyondTV in this new build.
However, when I set the res to 1920x1080, Arcsoft TMT shows some artifacts of upscaling, using really bad sampling (nearest neighbour). For example, I can see this clearly on the opening titles of the Departed BluRay, which has high-contrast white-on-black letters in the titles. The diagonal lines in the letters have all kinds of nasty jaggies. This seems to happen regardless of whether "hardware acceleration" is turned on in TMT or not.
If I use a reduced res (eg, 1840x1035), the nasty artifacts go away. Since Arcsoft TMT doesn't have any overscan compensation (someone correct me if I'm wrong), I have to do this anyway, otherwise the UI doesn't all fit on the screen. So although I'm forced to use this solution for now, I'm concerned that BeyondTV may now do some unwanted downscaling.
The question is, why is TMT doing any scaling at all? This seems backwards to me. Shouldn't 1920x1080 show no scaling artifacts, since it's displaying 1:1, and the reduced res force downscaling to occur? Or is the actual pixel rectangle of blu-ray video smaller than 1920x1080?
And (this question only for the graphics ubernerds in the crowd), even if it does have to use scaling, why is it doing nearest neighbour? Shouldn't it be doing bilinear filtering at a minimum, or hopefully bicubic?
The video card is GeForce 8600GT-based, using DVI->HDMI to a Sony KDS-60A2000 SXRD rear-projection (1080p).
In BeyondTV, I was in the habit of setting my resolution to native monitor resolution (1920x1080 in this case), and using the overscan compensation in BeyondTV to fit to the screen. This gave me 1:1 pixel mapping in the past. OTA ATSC video looked great, with no softness or visible scaling artifacts. This still seems to work fine for BeyondTV in this new build.
However, when I set the res to 1920x1080, Arcsoft TMT shows some artifacts of upscaling, using really bad sampling (nearest neighbour). For example, I can see this clearly on the opening titles of the Departed BluRay, which has high-contrast white-on-black letters in the titles. The diagonal lines in the letters have all kinds of nasty jaggies. This seems to happen regardless of whether "hardware acceleration" is turned on in TMT or not.
If I use a reduced res (eg, 1840x1035), the nasty artifacts go away. Since Arcsoft TMT doesn't have any overscan compensation (someone correct me if I'm wrong), I have to do this anyway, otherwise the UI doesn't all fit on the screen. So although I'm forced to use this solution for now, I'm concerned that BeyondTV may now do some unwanted downscaling.
The question is, why is TMT doing any scaling at all? This seems backwards to me. Shouldn't 1920x1080 show no scaling artifacts, since it's displaying 1:1, and the reduced res force downscaling to occur? Or is the actual pixel rectangle of blu-ray video smaller than 1920x1080?
And (this question only for the graphics ubernerds in the crowd), even if it does have to use scaling, why is it doing nearest neighbour? Shouldn't it be doing bilinear filtering at a minimum, or hopefully bicubic?
