Results

As you can see there is a huge difference in HQV benchmark scores, between simply installing the driver without any tweaking or fine-tuning all the settings. Another important result is that all HD decode accelerations are not equal. There are big differences when comparing discrete to integrated - if you want to use the image quality enhancement features.

Conclusion

After doing all this testing I am surprised by the range of possible scores, depending on how well you tune your driver settings. I am also shocked that neither ATI nor NVIDIA provide a good set of defaults that help novices get the best out of their graphics processor in regard to video. Another issue is the lack of documentation in both control panels. However, it is great to see that companies innovate in this field and offer adjustment options to power users. Now all that is missing is some magic algorithm that picks the best settings depending on the content played, so the required user intervention is minimal. When comparing ATI against NVIDIA, we see higher scores across the board on ATI and more elaborate options in the driver settings. According to AMD, a future Catalyst version will come with more video quality improvements enabled by the default, which should help ease the setup process.

One final point I would like to make is that studios usually do a good job when processing Blu-Ray HD content, so additional filters may cause you to miss out on some intended dark or low-contrast scenes. Personally I don't see the point of "film" grain noise included in many Blu-Ray movies, it would be easy to remove in post-processing and just creates an impression of lower fidelity for the majority of users, that's where the processing filters of graphics cards can shine: don't like the noise? Get rid of it with a few mouse clicks.