The HQV Benchmark
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: system, builder, marathon
7. The HQV Benchmark
| Test Name | Max. Score | Low End Media PC Result | High End MediaPC Result | Ideal Condition |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Color Bar/Vertical Detail | 10 | 10 | 10 | Able to show small color bars flicker-free |
| Jaggies Pattern 1 | 5 | 5 | 5 | No jaggies in a rotating line in a circle |
| Jaggies Pattern 2 | 5 | 1 | 3 | No jaggies in small lines moving slightly within an arc |
| Flag | 10 | 5 | 5 | No jaggies in a video of Old Glory flapping in a breeze |
| Picture Detail | 10 | 10 | 10 | Crisp video |
| Noise Reduction | 10 | 5 | 5 | Sharp image free from compression artifacts |
| Motion Adaptive Noise Reduction | 10 | 5 | 10 | Motion with no motion trails or smearing artifacts |
| 3:2 Detection | 10 | 5 | 5 | Overall sharpness is good, no moiré patters, TV locks into film mode almost immediately (5 frames or .2 seconds) |
| Film Cadence | 40 (5 points per test) | 20 | 30 | Runs 8 pulldown tests of different ratios, producing smooth, flicker free, jaggy-free, moiré pattern-free, quality resolution images |
| Scrolling titles (horiz) | 10 | 5 | 10 | No jaggies or artifacts in title text |
| Scrolling titles (vert) | 10 | 5 | 10 | No jaggies or artifacts in title text |
| TOTALS | 130 | 76 | 103 |
As with 3DMark05, the 8800 GTX graphics card really boosts performance on the HQV tests. The high end media PC received a score of 103, 24 points higher than the score given the low end PC with its Radeon X1250 GPU.
Is PC-Based HDMI Ready For Prime Time?
We've come to two seemingly unassailable conclusions that lead us to think that HDMI PCs may not yet be worth building or buying, given the current state of hardware and underlying technology. First, it turns out that all HDMI hardware currently used on PCs takes its audio from SP/DIF output originating on some kind of high-def audio processor, most usually Intel's High Definition Audio/Azalia chips or RealTek's 888x class of similar circuitry, but there's no reason why you couldn't also take outputs from other sound chips as well.
Alas, this means that standard Dolby Digital or DTS is the best you can get out of a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player and into whatever device you use to deliver multi-channel surround sound to your speakers. Ed's good friend and HTPC expert Matt Wright (a contributor to Ed's 2005 MCE book, "Build the Ultimate Home Theater PC") says that the quality of audio out from SP/DIF when delivered to a multi-channel speaker rig is no better, and may not even be as good as the 5.1 analog audio output you can get from most modern motherboards nowadays. High resolution audio could be decoded inside the PC, then output in analog 5.1 format, albeit with six cables instead of one.
When Ed researched and wrote the HDMI DIY story, he was inexperienced enough with his brand-new Sony STR-DA5200ES A/V receiver to have confused a menu of supported multi-channel surround sound decodes available from that device with the decode actually being applied to the incoming signal stream (or its "format recognition," if you will). Upon further study and closer examination, both Blu-ray and HD-DVD when played back on a PC produce only standard 5.1 DTS or 5.1 Dolby Digital as output. That explains why all the so-called higher-end decodes he thought he was hearing sounded the same, and in fact sounded no better than the aforementioned decodes (they were not just what he was actually listening to; they were all that is currently available).
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