First we will look at the 2D quality of the video card. This is one of if not the most important aspect of the video card, though many people do not take the time to look closely at the quality of display that they are constantly looking at. So lets take a look at how well the X700 Pro does with 2D quality. The test is the same as we've been using for a while, with the reference display being a Matrox G400 video card attached to a 21" Dell badged Trinitron monitor. The screen resolution was 1600*1200, with a color depth of 32bpp and a refresh rate of 85Hz. So lets see how it did in comparison.
| Test |
Matrox G400 |
Matrox Parhelia |
ATi Radeon 9800XT |
HIS X700 Pro IceQ Turbo |
Intel 915G IGP |
Albatron FX5750 |
| Black Text / White Back: |
5 |
7.5 |
7 |
7 |
4.5 |
5.5 |
| White Text / Black Back: |
5 |
8 |
7.25 |
7.5 |
5 |
7 |
| Bitmap Test: |
5 |
9 |
8.5 |
8 |
6 |
6.5 |
| Overall Rating |
5 |
8.25 |
7.5 |
7.5 |
5.25 |
6.25 |
We can see that this ATi based card does pretty well in our subjective test. Compared to the Matrox Parhelia it was somewhat brighter in all three tests, with this washing out the color slightly in the image test, but still making it better than most of the rest of the cards we have tested. Text was still good but the higher brightness, which most likely could be changed somewhat, caused the text to be a bit harder to read. Overall however this card has very good 2D quality.
Now for the video in tests, this test is a standard one that I have been using for awhile, with the video being output by a Matrox Parhelia. The video is a short scene from the claymation movie Chicken Run, with both text and rich video colors. So lets see the results with some cards that we have tested.
Reference Image
|
HIS X700 Pro Test Image
|
MSI GeForce 4MX Test Image
|
MSI GeForce FX Test Image
|
ATi AiW 9000 Pro Test Image
|
Compro VideoMate TV Ultra Test Image
|
The images of the cards are quite a bit different. The test image on the TV Ultra is fairly smooth, close to that of the GF4MX but staying closer to the actual test image which has no anti-aliasing occurring. The best card for displaying text on this test is the ATi AiW 9000 Pro with its clear lettering. The HIS X700 didn't do that great here with the text being fairly blurry and slightly washed out. The image colors were out as well, as the whole picture seemed quite washed out, especially in comparison to the AiW 9000 Pro and the reference image. Not the greatest showing in the way of video-in quality, it was more like we have seen from some nVidia based cards.
TV Out is becoming a major piece that video card manufacturers are putting into their video cards, as people are using their computer for displaying their movies and games onto their 'big' screen TV's. Our test uses two computers, one that contains a TV Tuner in this case the 5750 uses the AiW 9600 while the rest are using the ATi AiW 9000 though I haven't really noticed much, if any difference between the two cards. However we also have a reference image from the DVD that we used to test, that of the movie "Chicken Run", a claymation movie with plenty of vibrant colors and contrasts. All tests were output using a SVHS cable, so lets see the results.
Reference Image
|
HIS X700 Pro Test Image
|
Matrox Parhelia
|
ATi Radeon 9800XT
|
MSI FX5900U
|
Albatron PCX5750
|
So what does this picture show? The X700 provides a blurry text here, only slightly better than some of the other cards. Both the image and text of this card are much like that of the 9800XT, which isn't a great thing as for some reason ATi doesn't have great TV-Out quality. The Albatron card does antialias the text quite a bit. Otherwise the card slightly squishes the text horizontally by a small amount. As for the image quality of the output we see that there are points where there is a slight bit of blur and a higher brightness on the picture which isn't really desirable in this case. The overall picture is cut slightly on the horizontal, but not enough to distort the image greatly. The text for the 9800XT is sharper and has very little of the checkered pattern that the AiW 9000Pro had. For the rest of the image it is blurry but is smoother than that of the AiW 9000Pro. The TV out of the FX5900 Ultra suffers from a distorted image, that has a border on either side of the picture, and a fuzzy picture. There also seems to be a pronounced checker pattern on solid colors and also on the text, something we don't see with some of the other cards notably the Parhelia. While the text on the reference image is sharp and aliased, the Parhelia does a good job of antialiasing the text, while not overdoing it.
Unfortunately none of my tuners can support component in, but this connection does offer quite a bit of difference from the SVHS connection that most people still use.
3D quality is the last quality test we will look at. All video cards offer some form of antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering, from the 16X Ansio of the ATi cards, to the 8X AA of the nVidia based cards and even the 16X FAA of the Matrox video card. So lets see how each video card looks in our testing.
Looking first at the AA test we see that there is very little difference between the three cards without AA enabled. With the various levels of AA enabled (16,8,4) we see that the Parhelia comes out on top but only by a slim margin. If you look at the landscape in the background on the 5900 Ultra and PCX5750 and the Parhelia, you can notice that the Parhelia has just a smoother image. The Radeon 9000 is in last place in this test with its maximum of 4X AA. The 6X AA is pretty nice, looking better on more horizontal lines (horizon) than the 8X of the 5900U but worse with a more vertical line (rooftop).
Moving to the ansiotropic filtering of the cards, with it disabled the Parhelia has better filtering. You can notice that the ground seems 'bumpier' on the Parhelia without ansiotropic filtering even enabled, otherwise all of the other cards look very similar. With ansiotropic filtering enabled, we see that in this part of the image the Radeon 9000 doesn't really do much if any filtering, due to its adaptive design. The Parhelia's 2X ansio looks slightly better than its trilinear filtering. The Radeon 9800XT has extremely good ansiotropic filtering as at 16X it is much better than any of the others we have tested so far. I am also impressed by the 8X ansiotropic filtering of the Albatron card, though it is still not quite the same quality as the ATi cards with 16X.
