Video Card Roundup - DVD Quality, Features & Performance - October 2000

More than just performance

It doesn’t take much to realize that the answer to making a desirable DVD decoding solution isn’t solely producing one that’s high performing.  While performance is a major factor, it isn’t the only one. 

Image quality is quite possibly just as important, if not more important than DVD playback performance simply because, what good is the ability to play back a DVD on your PC at full speed if the image quality of the video is horrendous?  It is the same argument that was once the topic of heated debates in the 3D accelerator arena between 3dfx and NVIDIA supporters, performance vs image quality, which matters the most and why.

And just like in the 3D graphics arena, there is no one single way to benchmark image quality when it comes to DVD playback.  It is relatively simple to measure performance visually, you can easily notice any dropped frames or general choppiness during playback, however there is no standard benchmark for image quality.  At least there wasn’t for quite a while. 

MadOnion, the creators of 3DMark, put together one of the first comprehensive video related benchmarks called Video2000.  As we will come to see, the benchmark definitely does have its downsides, but at the same time helps to provide us with a solid metric for measuring DVD image quality as well as performance. 

Video2000 measures three aspects of your graphics card and system’s ability to play and manipulate complex video streams such as those from MPEG-2/DVD sources.  The suite measures the Quality, Features and finally Performance of your setup.  The three areas carry different weights, with quality and performance pulling 40% of the final score each, and the remaining 20% of the total Video2000 score belonging to the features tests.