Posted on Wednesday, March 14 2007 @ 3:01 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD
is claiming that Intel's test of their new integrated graphics chipset against the discrete ATI X1600 GPU could have been rigged. They state Intel may have misconfigured the test:
The test in question is the flapping American flag video from the HQV benchmark DVD from Silicon Optix. The DVD contains several other tests which are used to gauge how well television sets and graphics cards render video. In the flag video, good graphics cards can render the waving flag with little or no interlacing artifacts, more commonly called "jaggies" or "stair casing". In Intel's comparison, the AMD-powered computer appeared to render out huge 10 by 10 pixel jaggies during the full-screen flag video playback under the Cyberlink player. The video also had a much lower framerate and appeared to stutter at several points.
The Intel G965 computer rendered the video smoothly and we didn't notice any jaggies in between the stripes of the flag. Knupffer told TG Daily that their engineers did everything to make it a fair test between the G965 and AMD's X1600. In an email he writes, "Both machines were identically configured. Both Core 2 Duo's, both had the same memory, 965 chipsets, the same Windows Vista Ultimate build. Both had the latest drivers from the web, Catalyst 7.2 and Intel 15.2." Knupffer adds that his staff has contacted AMD engineers through back-channels to figure out if anything was incorrectly configured.
Since the video results appeared very lopsided, in Intel's favor, we wanted to verify that both machines were configured optimally. Nick Knupffer, PR Manager for Intel, did let us take a quick peek at the driver settings and the video files, but we found nothing wrong. The video files on both machines were the same size and resolution. We did not physically open any of the computers to verify the components.
We played back the video files on both machines with regular Windows Media Player because we wanted to test if the supposed lopsided performance was solely related to the Cyberlink playback software. With Windows Media Player, both computers appeared to play back the video at the same speed and with significant jaggies. Knupffer explained that this was because of Cyberlink's integrated with the G965's ClearVideo acceleration and smoothing routines...
