[buzz66]

At this stage all my AV gear is 7 to 10 years old. That is about to change.

I am gearing up to purchase Yamaha RX-V3800 AV processor & Sony 52" XBR series LCD TV.


I have my eye on the Abit A-N78HD. I saw a thread comparing the video quality of the 3450 Vs 4850, but I cant find anything about video quality for the 8200 IGP boards.

What I want is perfect BD 1080p HDMI video quality. Cost is not really an issue.

Heat & efficiency is important!


Will this board get a near perfect score just using the onboard 8200 gpu?

If not will it get there using 3450 hybrid SLI?

Will future driver updates get it there or not likely.

Should I wait for next generation of motherboards?

Or put in a dedicated graphics card?

 

[arfster]

HD HQV doesn't test anything relevant to 1080p playback. Doesn't even test scaling, so it's not relevant for film DVDs either. All it really does is deinterlacing tests (obviously only mattering for interlaced stuff), and denoising, which is aimed at video content, not film source material.


In fact, to be blunt, HD HQV is a joke. If a review uses it and equates it with "image quality" then you can safely ignore anything they say about HTPC issues.

 

[carrera1]



Quote:
Originally Posted by arfster /forum/post/14176446



In fact, to be blunt, HD HQV is a joke. If a review uses it and equates it with "image quality" then you can safely ignore anything they say about HTPC issues.

+1

 

[Davinleeds]

I'm surprised and first I heard of this. All other info says it's a standard. I personally can't tell by viewing but some HD and BD software players fail while others pass--what does that signify?

 

[redtyler1]

I'm interested in this discussion as well. Maybe renethx can chime in or some other folks. I guess I thought the HD HQV tested more than just how well the player displays 1080i material.

 

[archibael]

Actually, what arfster said is pretty accurate. HD HQV is all about 1080i processing.

http://www.hqv.com/contentEngine/dsp...e-f1edd6040515


In fact, the documentation of the test even includes "film grain" as a source of image noise... which is fine except that the section of the document is about how important noise reduction is to high quality video. I read this as HQV being pretty happy about removing film grain from the image... which to me is a big no-no.


Video resolution loss is about correct interpretation of moving vs non-moving parts of the image during deinterlacing, video reconstruction is about jaggies during deinterlacing, and film resolution loss is about reconstructing a 1080p24 source from a 1080i60 video.


I don't think it's a "joke", per se, but with the majority of HD disks mastered from 24p source, the results of the test are somewhat less useful for Blu-ray and HD DVD sources. If you watch a lot of recorded-from-broadcast/cable HD material or concert videos (many of which are sourced from 1080i), then the benchmark is more relevant.

 

[renethx]

arfster and archibael are right.


For 1080p, you can expect the same PQ as from discrete GeForce graphics such as 8600 GT and 9600 GT.


For 1080i, HD HQV scores are helpful to see how good GPU is in deinterlacing:


- Video Resolution Loss: 0/20

- Jaggies: 10/20

- Film Resolution Loss: 0/25

- Film Resolution Loss - Sadium: 10/10


So GeForce 8200 is not good. 8600 GT and 9600 GT are (near) perfect.

 

[buzz66]

Thanks guys I just learnt something.

Now you have said all that. De-interlacing is important to me, because we will be recording a lot of TV stuff ETC.


So will the perforamance be better using the board in hybrid SLI mode or won't that make any difference?

 

[renethx]

 Hybrid SLI (GeForce Boost) does not help deinterlacing either

 

[redtyler1]

Huh...

So, if all you're going to be doing with your HTPC is watching BluRay, and you wanted to use an IGP and a 45w proc, the BD won't look any better if you had used a Phenom instead or were using a 9600GT or 4850 in place of the IGP. The only differences are power consumption and the availability of hi def audio. Do I have that right?

 

[archibael]

Some Blu-ray disks are 1080i (when derived from video source). Aside from that, yes, HD HQV scores are irrelevant to Blu-ray.

 

[Davinleeds]

Any ideas why it would pass using PDVD and fail with TMT with 1080p material as discussed in Arc Forums: http://www.arcsoft.com/forum/forum_p...p?TID=463&PN=1

 

[arfster]

At a guess, the tmt decoders aren't sending out the correct color space? At least with ATI, if you send the cards anything other than NV12 it won't deinterlace or indeed any postprocessing.


Alternatively, they could be stripping the bob flag? Again, the hardware needs that flag, or else it doesn't know to deinterlace.