11. The A/V Experience

The biggest reason for using HDMI, of course, is to gain access to high-definition DVD formats such as Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD. We included both of these elements in this system build to give our 1080i and 1080p movies a workout, and another high-definition workout for this test system came from watching high-definition TV using the AverMedia TVHD card. Across the board, the picture was stellar, except that SDTV and 480p DVDs looked kind of cruddy by comparison. It's hard to go back to bologna after you've started eating real red meat!

The truth is that watching video, even when some decoding is necessary to handle the image display, is not as demanding as the 3D games from which other benchmarks so often get their most important graphics information. For the purposes of its intended use, the HQV benchmarks probably tell the overall story better than 3DMark and help to put the screaming graphics scores in PCMark05 and 3DMark05 into the right perspective - namely that if you did want to game as well as watch video in the comfort of your living or family room, a higher-end graphics card might make a welcome addition to an HTPC's bill of materials.

A Note On The 8800 GTX Card

Conventional 480p DVD and SDTV is child's play for the 8800, mostly because the relatively low resolution poses no difficulties for the GPU and its capabilities. This video is clean and very fast, but the 8800 doesn't really add much there in terms of quality or quantity. But to my surprise, the 8800 actually brings added capability when it comes to dealing with 1080i (high-quality HDTV broadcast signals and older HD-DVDs) and to dealing with 1080p (newer HD-DVDs, Blu-ray discs), primarily because its massive graphics processing power helps it to clean up noisy signals, render motion at great speeds with little or no edge artifacts, and handle encoding/decoding tasks with considerable dispatch on the fly.

The HQV results for today's system are particularly illustrative of these strengths, though they show that because the set-up lacks special video processing circuitry - such as that from Silicon Optix itself, Faroudja, and others - that is built into many high-end DVD players (hi-def and conventional), it doesn't do as good a job with cadencing or noise reduction as devices that include such circuitry.

That said, the value of the 8800's core capabilities - namely, pixel shading, anti-aliasing, anisotropic and other digital image filters, plus complex texture rendering - are more significant to gaming where everything starts from mathematical models of objects being wireframed, surface textured, lighted, and often animated as well. There's a lot more calculation involved in modeling the stuff you depict from scratch, rather than rendering an existing set of complex images acquired through a digital camera.

Onto The Summary And Conclusions

Tomorrow, we'll sum up our experiences in building and using HDMI, high-definition, and conventional media on Windows XP Media Center Edition. We plan to share some shocking observations about why HDMI link-ups for PCs may still be ahead of their time, describe what it was like maneuvering pieces and parts in the cramped confines of our two HTPC cases, express some reservations about some of our component choices and make some recommendations as to how one might improve upon the various systems involved. Finally, we'll show you some photographs of how these two builds turned out, and point out some interesting gotchas.

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