Xbit HTPC GPU Roundup
I would have liked to have seen more on picture quality and a look how colorspace is handled between the different vendors, but overall Xbit does a good job of quantitatively measuring
(IMO, their HQV HD scores are a bit generous) GPU performance for HTPC use.
It is almost impossible to install longer graphics cards – such as
ATI Radeon HD 5800 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 400/200 – into computer cases
that resemble consumer electronics appliances like Blu-ray/DVD players.
On the other hand, graphics cards that seem to be perfect for HTPCs
cannot run modern games with all the eye-candy enabled in 1920×1080
resolution. In addition, such graphics cards come equipped with rather
loud cooling systems that are not welcomed guests of living rooms.As
a result of these trends, this review does not include evaluation of
high-end graphics boards, which were not designed for home-theater
computers. Instead, we decided to concentrate on evaluation of quality
of HD video playback using HQV 2.0 tools recently released by IDT. In
addition, we will check out power consumption of modern graphics cards
that can be plugged into HTPCs, CPU load during Blu-ray disc playback
and some other factors.