ATI's All-In-Wonder X1900 Performance And DVD Decoding Quality

Final Words

It's nice to know that the problems ATI have had in the past with getting a product out on launch date are a thing of the past. We saw many of these AIW X1900s on sale on the day of release with a hefty price tag of around $500. The price has gone down slightly since then, and you can currently get one of these cards for about $455, which is still fairly expensive. Given the capabilities of this card however, the price makes sense. The All-In-Wonder X1900 is the AIW for those who want the best possible performance in games, while still being able to record and watch video on their computer. We've mentioned before that these cards are somewhat specialized and a large part of their attractiveness is their gaming and multimedia features in one easy-to-use package. Many users might opt for the lower price or better features of having a separate graphics card and home theater card instead.

We've seen now how well ATI does with DVD processing, and the benchmarks show that ATI does a better job at this overall than NVIDIA. Here are the final HQV benchmark scores.

ATI: 111 NVIDIA: 68

These numbers represent the total numbers for each test added together for each card. As we can see ATI scores better overall than NVIDIA, which is interesting considering NVIDIA's PureVideo decoding was consistently better than ATI's software in the past. What is important to keep in mind however, is that certain tests could be considered more or less important to individual users depending on what types of video they will be dealing with. For example, while ATI gets a better overall score, NVIDIA still does a better job at picture detail (sharpness) than ATI, so that might be a factor to consider when looking for a decoder. Also, some of the tests may not apply at all to your situation, like the mixed film with horizontal and vertical text. If you don't watch news channels with scrolling text you may never have a need for this option.

Where NVIDIA loses the most points is in the Film Cadence tests, as well as the Noise Reduction test. We can conclude then that these benchmarks show that ATI has a wider set of capabilities in their DVD decoding than NVIDIA does. Add to that the fact that ATI's DVD decoder is free to ATI customers while NVIDIA's PureVideo decoder costs an extra $30 and ATI definitely has a winning solution on their hands.

With ATI leading now in the "king-of-the-hill" game of graphics solutions, we now look to NVIDIA for a response, while wondering what's in store for graphics in the semi-long term. If performance continues to increase at the rate that it has been, we aren't sure how game software will be able to keep up. We are always happy when we see advancements in technology, but the huge sizes of some of these high end cards make us think better efficiency might be good direction for graphics hardware to move toward. But of course, advancements in hardware performance will always leave the door open for game software to advance, which is good news for everyone.