After putting it off for a long time, I am doing some work on my HTPC again. In the process of researching, I ran across this great article. Lots of nifty screenshots that explain different aspects of video technology and how ATI and NVidia products compare to stand-alone component.
(Of course, I read it after purchasing an NVidia card :)
ATI and nVidia crush high-end DVD players
HQV benchmark shows the overwhelming quality of current graphics cards
01/09/2006
Final scores
The total score for nVidia ends up being 93, where the total ATI score is 118. Both scores are extremely high, considering the score of the most best performing DVD player we tested (the Marantz DV6600) was only 63. The majority of the standalone players we used did not score more than 40 points in the test. The most expensive ones, the Denon DVD-3910 and Marantz DV9600 scored only 58 and 61 points.
For European readers the cadence tests are not of real importance, so we only take the first eight tests into consideration. The score then is slightly different, nVidia scored 58 in these tests, where as ATI scored 53. A pretty close result, and the slight advantage for nVidia is mainly due to the excellent PureVideo performance in the detail tests.
