Summary
The first step has been made. Although none of the boards could be said to offer professional quality, their price-to-performance ratio has reached an acceptable level. ATI has developed the best graphics chip for MPEG playback. Using Motion Compensation (MC) and iDCT, the system CPU's workload is effectively reduced. All the other graphic chips in this test didn't have this feature and needed powerful processors to play back MPEG video jitter-free, whether from a DVD or using self-generated ones.
Two aspects should be taken into consideration with regard to quality: optimal quality is attained at full TV resolution. This means 704x512 in America's NTSC or 720x576 pixels for the PAL standard in Europe. Higher formats such as HDTV generate extremely high data stream volumes that can even bring professional equipment to its knees. If you only want to show your videos to others, or if you want to free your hard disk from some of the data load, only the good old CD-Rs are realistic as a storage medium as DVD writers aren't affordable for normal users. The only purposeful resolution that can be considered in this case is half TV resolution. Then at least, you can split a 90 minute video onto two CD-Rs. One shouldn't place too high demands on the playback quality of such videos (half or standard resolution). The lower quality can be easily seen on a high quality computer monitor. By comparison, the loss in quality isn't quite so apparent on a television.
If you select full TV resolution, then the video will almost always have to remain on the hard disk of the computer. The advantage is that the quality is then quite acceptable for all boards (with the exception of the Voodoo3 3500TV). However, you'll need a big hard disk in your system - you won't get far with less than 10 GB - as the charts of the videos produced show.
