HD HQV video image quality
We've seen how these cards compare in terms of CPU utilization and power consumption during HD video playback, but what about image quality? That's where the HD HQV test comes in. This HD DVD disc presents a series of test scenes and asks the observer to score the device's performance in dealing with specific types of potential artifacts or image quality degradation. The scoring system is somewhat subjective, but generally, the differences are fairly easy to spot. If a device fails a test, it usually does so in obvious fashion. I conducted these tests at 1920x1080 resolution on all cards. Here's how they scored.

I don't think the video post-processing features in Nvidia's 163.11 drivers are 100% cooked for the GeForce 8800 lineup. We've seen them achieve nearly a perfect score in HQV on a GeForce 8600, but no such result here. I deducted points from the GeForce cards in the jaggies test due to some odd, intermittent corruption artifacts that, when present, were worse than jaggies themselves. I suppose a score of zero might be appropriate here, if you're not feeling lenient. Also, the film resolution loss tests are firm fails.

All cards lost points in the HD noise reduction test for artifacts. The Nvidia cards had some funky temporal artifacts, and the Radeons had some obvious de-interlacing problems. Ultimately, the Radeon HD cards come out looking much better in the final score.

That's not the whole story, though. I've found that Nvidia's noise reduction algorithm can be effective in HQV, but it's unfortunately a net negative when used with actual HD movies. The algorithm introduces color banding and other artifacts that really annoy me. Nvidia has a long way to go before its noise reduction produces a good HQV score and is something you'd want to use every day.

That said, in my experience, noise reduction and other post-processing techniques aren't really necessary for most high-quality HD content like HD DVD movies. Those discs were mastered with a particular look to them, and applying post-processing filters to them isn't really necessary. The video looks great, regardless. Taking out film grain may even sully the director's intent. HQV tests tough cases where the video source has problems. If a card can overcome those, it's done something special and worthwhile.

For me, the biggest issue of all is the GeForce 8800 cards' inability to support HDCP over dual-link DVI, which effectively kills their ability to play back HD movies on our gorgeous digital HD display. I'd worry a lot more about that than I would about an HD HQV score.