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Date Posted: October 2 , 2002

2D and TV Quality

    Now, one thing that Matrox has been famous for is its 2D quality.  Since we spend all our time on the computer looking at 2D images, it is only fitting to look at this most important feature of a video card.  For this test we will use as a test monitor a slightly used (warning need Dell registration).  The tests were run at 1600*1200 with a refresh rate of 85Hz (75Hz in the case of the limited Kyro II).  The tests run were two html documents which filled up the entire screen, using IE 5.5 pressing F11 for full screen.  As my eyes aren't the best I had my tester Peter from the audio tests of the Santa Cruz do the 2D quality tests, so note that this is one persons evaluation of the 2D quality and is a subjective test.

    The three video cards used for four tests are as follows:  G400 32MB DH; Parhelia Head 1; Kyro II 64MB; Parhelia Head 2 (Clone Mode).   Let us see how he rated the cards (Out of 10):

    What can we see from these results?  We see the Parhelia (at least the primary head) is the best when text is shown, as the reviewer said, it was a card that he would be able to use for a day in a normal work environment.  The second head fairs worse, this may be due to it possibly using the 168MHz RAMDAC on the Parhelia and not the secondary 400MHz RAMDAC.  The Kyro II is a fair surprise, as it is fairly good at displaying text.  Overall the Parhelia seems to do better than my faithful G400 in these quality tests.  In normal use I've found that the Parhelia is much brighter it seems on my monitor (after calibration), the G400 seems 'richer' and more to my liking, the Kyro II has very washed out colors and is fairly bad for normal use.

    Now lets look at some TV Quality tests.  For this test we used DVD-Max on both the Parhelia and the G400 to send a frame of the movie Chicken Run to my ATi TV-Wonder capture card.  A 6ft S-Video cable was used for the video out, and was captured in IuVCR using HuffYUV compression at 720*480.  The same frame was captured off the video using VirtualDub, and also the reference frame was also captured using HuffYUV compression direct from the DVD using Xmpeg 4.2a.  As a note, both cards cropped some of the borders of the picture and as such there is a slight bit of missing image from the two cards in comparison to the reference image, also the default image quality was used.   To download a uncompressed version of the pictures please click on this link.  Lets see how the cards fair.

The Reference Image
The G400 Test Image	The Parhelia Test Image

    We can see that the Parhelia gives a much brighter image, and in my opinion it gives a better image than the G400 does.  The text is very nice with the Parhelia almost looking better than the reference images text.  While the G400 has good TV-Out quality, in my opinion the Parhelia seems that much better, it may be the 10-bit precision decoding of the Parhelia that accounts for this, but whatever the case it does look very nice. 

    As for DVD decoding, the Parhelia's motion compensation helped it lower CPU usage on my 1.25GHz Athlon from the 26.9% CPU Utilization of the Kyro II (1:14 seconds to decode 4:45 of video) to 18.5% CPU Utilization (53 seconds to decode video).   The video used was from "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" as used in our video encoding tests.  While not an extreme drop in utilization it is better than nothing, and can help free up resources that you need.

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