Blu-ray Disc Playback

For our Blu-ray playback testing, we used Cyberlink's PowerDVD 8 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 maximum CPU usage during this section of the film.



We tried to get the CPU usage down but it's not the first time we've seen this from Intel with an h.264 Blu-ray movie: it just doesn't seem to be that optimised or has the hardware capable of effectively handling it.

h.264 High-Definition Playback

For h.264 playback we used Media Player Classic - Home Cinema Edition under the Enhanced Video Renderer filter option (guide here) which enabled use of the video accelerator inside today's IGPs just like PowerDVD. Unlike Cyberlink's solution though, MPC-HC is completely free.



In contrast the h.264 trailers fare quite well and even the 1080p one is in favour of Intel by nearly 20 percent.