6. 3DMark05

3DMark05 runs a series of video source materials through the system and measures its graphics performance at two different settings: first, with anti-aliasing (No AA) and anisotropic filtering (No AF) turned off, then with 4x anti-aliasing (4xAA) and 4x anisotropic filtering (4xAF) (the highest the Radeon X1250 would go) turned on. These results show how the graphics subsystem performs with (4xAA 4xAF) and without (No AA No AF) complex shading and edge filtering mechanisms enabled.

Without these visual enhancements turned on scores go up, but the video is less attractive; with these visual enhancements enabled scores go down, but the video looks better. This matters much more for gaming than for DVD video, but does provide a useful metric for graphic subsystem performance. That said, the only thing we can say about performance on all of these benchmarks is "painfully slow." This is NOT a gaming machine.

For notebook PCs with low graphics horsepower, 3DMark values are generally distributed in a range from 200 to 600. Our Asus M2A-VM HDMI 4600+ system with its built-in Radeon x1250 does a little bit better than that, but just barely.

The HQV Benchmark

Here, HQV stands for "Hollywood Quality Video". HQV consists of a regular DVD that includes numerous scenes that present potential visual problems to a DVD decoder. Points are awarded if the decoder handles the problems so that viewers don’t see them; points are not awarded if it doesn’t do the job. In looking over our benchmark results, we immediately observed that the Intel and AMD processors scored the same, irrespective of their model numbers (and in fact, the results from both processors are pretty similar).

Rather than stepping you through the entire sequence of tests and explaining them in detail, we refer you to Don Woligroski’s January 9, 2007, article for Tom’s Hardware entitled Avivo vs. Purevideo, Round 1 wherein he walks readers through the whole shebang.

Here, we provide a brief table that summarizes results for our AMD 4600+ equipped system with an explanation and remarks for each one. We need only observe here that each test (or sub-test, when a particular test involves multiple versions or iterations) produces a maximum score, where a lower score indicates the degree to which the decoder was able to handle things perfectly.

Video quality is not as sharp and clear when it’s coming from the Radeon X1250 as it was in our tests with a separate graphics board, a 7600 GT. It’s not intolerable, but it is of noticeably lower quality than what we observed in our DIY HDMI story where the AMD-based systems scored 93 and the Intel-based systems scored 88 using the 7600 GT.