HD Video & Audio Playback (Blu Ray / 3D Blu Ray)
One of the main selling points of any budget friendly graphics card is its supposed ability to decode the high definition images that define current generation Blu Rays.
In this test we take two demanding 2D movies (Avatar and The Dark Knight) which have each been encoded in a different format and play them back in order to determine CPU usage. In addition, a single 3D Blu Ray is used (Clash of the Titans 3D).
The signals are passed through to an Onkyo NR-808 receiver which has the ability to detect and play back lossless audio as well as pass through HDMI 1.4a signals for 3D playback. For all clips, lossless audio is enabled through PowerDVD 10 Ultra.
There is however one thing to note: the peak CPU usage should be taken with a grain of salt since and is included for reference purposes only. Even though every other unnecessary process has been disabled, there will always be some CPU usage not being dedicated to video playback. This means “peaks” could very well be influenced by sources outside a GPU’s ability to play back HD content.
Avatar (MPEG4 AVC + DTS HD Master Audio)
With a bitrate of 28.81 Mbps, Avatar is one of the most demanding Blu Ray movies currently around but every one of the GPUs here displayed an excellent ability to shunt video processing away from the CPU. For whatever reason, the AMD cards did do slightly worse than the PureVideo-equipped NVIDIA card but the difference between the two was minimal at most. It also seems like the new UVD3 allows for slightly better performance over UVD2.
The Dark Knight (VC-1 + Dolby TrueHD)
Performance in The Dark Knight closely mirrors that of Avatar as all of the cards perform quite similarly to one another.
Clash of the Titans 3D (MPEG4 MVC + DTS HD Master Audio)
Adding 3D into the mix really does push things to the next level with a constant bitrate of around 33 Mbps but once again, none of these GPUs really have an issue handling that. It should be noted however that if you are using a single core or lower end dual core CPU, you'll likely want a slightly higher end GPU if you plan on viewing stereo 3D content.
HD Video & Audio Playback (Blu Ray / 3D Blu Ray)
One of the main selling points of any budget friendly graphics card is its supposed ability to decode the high definition images that define current generation Blu Rays.
In this test we take two demanding 2D movies (Avatar and The Dark Knight) which have each been encoded in a different format and play them back in order to determine CPU usage. In addition, a single 3D Blu Ray is used (Clash of the Titans 3D).
The signals are passed through to an Onkyo NR-808 receiver which has the ability to detect and play back lossless audio as well as pass through HDMI 1.4a signals for 3D playback. For all clips, lossless audio is enabled through PowerDVD 10 Ultra.
There is however one thing to note: the peak CPU usage should be taken with a grain of salt since and is included for reference purposes only. Even though every other unnecessary process has been disabled, there will always be some CPU usage not being dedicated to video playback. This means “peaks” could very well be influenced by sources outside a GPU’s ability to play back HD content.
Avatar (MPEG4 AVC + DTS HD Master Audio)
With a bitrate of 28.81 Mbps, Avatar is one of the most demanding Blu Ray movies currently around but every one of the GPUs here displayed an excellent ability to shunt video processing away from the CPU. For whatever reason, the AMD cards did do slightly worse than the PureVideo-equipped NVIDIA card but the difference between the two was minimal at most. It also seems like the new UVD3 allows for slightly better performance over UVD2.
The Dark Knight (VC-1 + Dolby TrueHD)
Performance in The Dark Knight closely mirrors that of Avatar as all of the cards perform quite similarly to one another.
Clash of the Titans 3D (MPEG4 MVC + DTS HD Master Audio)
Adding 3D into the mix really does push things to the next level with a constant bitrate of around 33 Mbps but once again, none of these GPUs really have an issue handling that. It should be noted however that if you are using a single core or lower end dual core CPU, you'll likely want a slightly higher end GPU if you plan on viewing stereo 3D content.
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