Blu-ray Disc Playback

For our Blu-ray playback testing, we used PowerDVD Ultra with the standard settings enabled and audio was sent over HDMI to our test monitor. The Casino Royale BD-DVD is one of the most popular Blu-ray movies to date and it is a high bit-rate h.264 stream, which makes it ideal for testing CPU usage.

We used five minutes of playback during a high motion action section with lots of panning – we recorded the average and minimum CPU usage during this section of the film.



At 1080p, the GeForce 8200 PureVideo HD engine kicks in to reduce CPU overhead by roughly the same degree as the UVD engine in the AMD 780G - there's a few percent overhead on the Nvidia board but both are pretty much in the same range. At 720p however, the AMD 780G drops about a third of its CPU usage, while the GeForce 8200 remains virtually the same - clearly the 780G is recognising that there are less pixels to render so avoids spending the time on them, unlike the 8200 which seems to render the entire video then worry about the output later. Which has better quality though? After all, 30 versus 20 percent load is hardly pushing the limits or saving you a lot.

We even tested a lower power (and lower clocked) AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350 processor, and comparatively that sat at just 37.3 percent average and 29.2 percent minimum CPU load at full-HD 1080p – an excellent result for a £55 CPU.

HD DVD Disc Playback

For HD DVD playback performance, we used PowerDVD Ultra again with the same configuration – standard software settings enabled and audio sent via HDMI. This time, we used V for Vendetta HD DVD, which is a medium bitrate disc authored using the VC-1 codec.

Again, we used five minutes of playback during a high motion action section with lots of panning – we recorded the average and minimum CPU usage during this section of the film.



The PureVideo HD engine works a fraction better than UVD with a VC-1 encoded movie, and there is a pretty respectable few percent drop from the GeForce 8200 downscaling from 1080p down to 720p. What’s more, this is in line with the CPU usage drop on the AMD 780G board from Gigabyte too. Both have oodles of overhead to play with and successfully accelerate the VC-1 movie.