Video Card Roundup - DVD Quality, Features & Performance - October 2000

Final Words

And thus we conclude our first entry into the world of DVD performance. We have seen some very interesting things in this investigation, for starters, it's obvious that in the quest to be the best, often times very little attention is paid to video features that are becoming increasingly important as time goes by.

It is very surprising to see the Savage 2000 come out on top in terms of features since we are so used to seeing it placed at the bottom of the list. It is a shame that the Savage 2000 went down the path it did, because with solid driver support and the very low prices it got to, the Savage 2000 could have been an excellent overall solution.

3dfx and Matrox are far behind the times in terms of video features, you can only focus on a single aspect of the market for so long before your competitors begin to surpass you. For 3dfx it was sheer power and performance, for Matrox it was 2D quality, and for both of them, those are arguments that don't hold up as well as they once did when the competition was struggling to keep up.

ATI has shown once again that it is the king of the video world, in terms of features, quality and performance, the Radeon is the mark that 3dfx, Matrox and NVIDIA should aim for. For the first time since the 3D revolution took off, ATI doesn't only have to tout their video features, but they can also boast some very high performing gaming frame rates as well. If ATI can successfully follow up the Radeon's release with another hard hitting product, while continuing to improve on their drivers, NVIDIA could begin to feel some serious heat from the company that just a year ago we would've never expected to have come this far.

What will the future bring us? As CPUs continue to increase in power, hardware assisted MPEG-2/DVD decoding will become less of an issue, and serious multitasking while playing DVDs will become more commonplace. However, what is currently a very CPU intensive task is decoding MPEG-4 video. What will really be a benefit as time goes on will be hardware assisted MPEG-4 decoding, as even today's mainstream processors aren't too happy decoding these complex streams.