The first thing we should mention is that there are a few settings we had to pay attention to in order to get things working for the HQV benchmark. PowerDVD enables HD video acceleration by default, which is great, but it no longer allows the feature to be disabled. This means that if you're experiencing glitches like the one we experienced with the 8400 GS, it's impossible to turn acceleration off to see if it is possible to get it to work in a CPU-only mode. Doh!

Second, for the HQV tests to work, hardware de-interlacing must be turned on in the PowerDVD advanced options. In most cases this was on by default, but sometimes it seemed to be off depending on the OS and card we used, so this is definitely something to check.

Finally, also ensure that 'pulldown detection' is enabled in the Radeon's Catalyst drivers, and that 'inverse telecine' is enabled in the Geforce drivers.

We used Silicon Optix's HQV HD-DVD benchmark in our last Avivo HD vs. Purevideo HD comparison. In the previous tests, all tested video cards scored a zero, as HD post-processing image quality enhancements were not yet enabled in the GeForce drivers, and the Radeon 2x00 series was not yet released. Well, it's been quite a few months since then, so let's see if the Radeon and GeForce driver teams have made any headway.