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Image Quality
3D image quality was excellent, and on par with what the past ATI cards are capable of. If you want to see how some games would look, I invite you to checkout that review.
We loaded up a 1600x1200 image David and I normarlly use in our video card reviews. I also pulled up several word documents with various sized fonts to judge the text rendering. The documents used white text on a black background, and vice versa. The screen resolution for all tests was 1600x1200 @ 85Hz on a Dell rebranded 21" Trinitron.
Scores are subjective, but having worked with many video cards the last few years, I got a pretty firm grasp on what card renders 2D better than the others. The scores will be out of 10, with 10 being excellent.
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All-in-Wonder 9800
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MSI FX5900-VTD
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All-in-Wonder 9700
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MSI MX440-T8x
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Black Text (12Pt)
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9
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8
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9
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8
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Black Text (6Pt)
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8
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7
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8
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6
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White Text (12Pt)
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9
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8
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9
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7
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White Text (6Pt)
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8
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6
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8
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4
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Bitmap Quality
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9
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8
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9
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7
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All the ATI cards looked pretty much the same to me, but there is an obvious quality drop when moving to the MX440. The MX440 rendered white text on a dark background horribly, and in order not to lose my eyesight, I had to use the mouse to select blocks of text I wanted to read. The FX5900 was a little better, but it was still difficult reading that same white text.
TV-Out Quality
I grabbed an AVI file of Cradle to the Grave (captured from a satellite feed), and outputted it to CRT on the AiW 9800 Pro, the AiW 9700 Pro, the AiW 8500DV, and on the FX5900.
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AiW 9800 Pro
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AiW 9700 Pro
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AiW 8500 DV
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FX5900-VTD
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There's nary a difference between the 9800 Pro and 9700 Pro. This isn't too surprising since both cards use the Theater 200 to help process and clean up the video. The 8500 DV isn't bad, but it has a slightly grainier image. The FX5900 on the otherhand is both grainy and dark. It isn't terrible, but the quality isn't up to the 9700/9800's levels.
Cobra Engine - TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding
Video editing is a taxing chore, which is why we choose to use it on motherboards to test performance. However, given the reported advantages of the Cobra Engine, we thought it'd be interesting to see if the AiW 9800 Pro would fare better than the FX5900. We'll using TMPGEnc 2.512 to encode a 101.56MB AVI file, 29.97FPS, 13:24 in length, to a 23FPS MPG file. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
The AIW 9800 Pro is a good 13 seconds faster at encoding the file than the FX5900. This works out to about 2.5% faster, which isn't close to the maximum 20-25% ATI claims, but we may see a larger percentage with a larger MPG file.
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