Video Quality Tested: GeForce Vs. Radeon In HQV 2.0

AMD Video Quality Driver Settings

With the Catalyst 10.12 driver, AMD has revamped the look of its driver settings interface, eliminating the last vestiges of ATI branding. It’s more or less functionally identical when you dig down into the actual options, though.

To avoid wasting time in sub-menu navigation levels, the first thing to do is select Preferences and switch to the Advanced view. After this, selecting Video and then Video Settings from the left-side menu delivers all of the relevant selections in one single window. The first section is Basic Video Color. This doesn’t have much to do with video quality, as it’s more geared toward setting the color and saturation to taste. We’ll leave the “Use application settings” checkbox enabled here.

Next is the Advanced Video Color section. Some of these settings, such as “Color vibrance” and “Video gamma,” can be set to taste and aren’t relevant to the benchmark. Flesh-tone correction is benchmarked though, and since this option removes excess reds from flesh tones, we’ll leave it enabled at the default value. The “Brighter whites” option increases the blue value of video for brighter shades of white, but we’ll disable this option because we find it can cause overexposure problems when combined with the dynamic contrast feature.

[EDIT: We’ve set “Dynamic range” to “Limited” to keep things on an even keel with the GeForce cards that default to this value when other enhancements are enabled. Dynamic range doesn’t appear to have an impact on HQV scoring, but the Full setting does provide a wider range of brightness between white and black if it's appropriate for your display. Most televisions expect a 16-235 signal range, while monitors expect a 0-255 range. Choosing an inappropriate range can cause a loss of contrast, but we didn't experience any contrast issues that would affect scoring during our tests.]

The Basic Video Quality section is just below. We want to make sure that “Use automatic deinterlacing” and “Pulldown detection” are both enabled. Automatic deinterlacing should smooth out the jaggies we’d otherwise see between fields of video playback, and pulldown detection converts videos of various frame rates into 30 frames per second (FPS) video for smooth playback.

The Advanced Quality section contains a lot of the more powerful toys. “Edge enhancement” can actually take blurry or lower-resolution video and sharpen the detail. “De-noise” is the next setting, which removes random noise from images and can make lower-quality recordings appear clearer by taking out some of the gritty imperfections. “Mosquito Noise Reduction” and “De-blocking” are optimizations designed to remove imperfections in highly compressed video. The former reduces the look of blotchy edges, and the latter smoothes images and decreases unwanted edges. Finally, the “Enable dynamic contrast” option automatically adjusts gamma and contrast to enhance clarity and color vibrance in scenes that are overly bright or dim.

In the video playback section there are only two options. The first is “Enforce Smooth Video Playback.” Enabling it prevents dropped frames by disabling some of the processor-intensive options we’ve just pointed out above. For today’s tests, we’ll disable this feature, as we want to make sure the graphics cards can handle the options we’ve set. But for actual movie playback, it might be a good idea to leave this option enabled if you have lower-end hardware. The next option is “Apply current settings to Internet video,” something you may very well want to enable if you want your YouTube clips to benefit from the quality enhancements we’re discussing.

The final section is called Video Demo Mode, and its only purpose is to allow the user to see the difference that these video enhancements can provide. While you can certainly play with the feature to see what the video hardware can do, it’s not something you need to enable during regular playback.

Now let's move on to the settings we used with each Radeon graphics card we tested. As mentioned previously, low-end cards may have all of the options available, but they can’t handle smooth playback with the complete suite enabled. We’ve tested the cards at the settings we list below to ensure that they can manage 1080p playback with the best quality possible.

While the Radeon HD 5450 has the “Edge enhancement” and “Enable dynamic contrast” options available, we find that it isn’t able to provide smooth playback with these turned on. Fortunately, the card is able to handle a de-noise value of 80, which helps smoothing out regular noise, in addition to compression artifacts, despite its lack of “Mosquito Noise Reduction” and “de-blocking” settings.

The Radeon HD 5550 uses the same options as the 5450, but can also handle “Edge enhancement,” an option we think works best when set to 35. Note that the 5550 exposes “Mosquito Noise Reduction” and “De-blocking” enhancements in the driver, but our testing suggests the card is not fast enough to enable them during testing without performance compromises. 

The Radeon 5670 is powerful enough for us to enable “De-blocking” and “Dynamic contrast,” but “Mosquito Noise Reduction” proves too much for the card to handle. The de-blocking setting doesn’t seem to make a noticeable difference in lowering compression artifacts, but dynamic contrast will help the 5670 gain points in the benchmark.

The Radeon HD 5750 is the lowest-priced Radeon that can handle all of the driver’s video enhancements without choking up playback. With “Mosquito Noise Reduction” enabled, we can reduce the basic “De-noise” value to 64 and still get the highest benchmark score possible for Radeon cards. Note that the Radeon HD 6850 uses the equivalent settings and delivers the same HQV benchmark score.