CPU Utilization during HD-Video Playback: Blu-ray Playback

ATI’s graphics cards demonstrate stably lower CPU utilization than their opponents. I can’t say that the results of ATI Radeon HD 5700 are dramatically different from the CPU utilization with previous generation graphics cards, which is in fact pretty logical considering how powerful ATI Radeon HD 4000 solutions are.

As opposed to VC-1, there are no clear leaders or losers when the cards are decoding MPEG4 AVC/H.264. The average CPU load is within 16%, which is rather low. ATI Radeon HD 5700 shows more of the low rather than high CPU utilization.

ATI and Nvidia took into account that decoding of MPEG2 HD video is an important (as there are first-generation Blu-ray discs in the market still), even though not crucial (in fact all new Blu-ray discs use more progressive MPEG4 AVC or VC-1 codecs) factor of a graphics card’s performance. As you can see, both companies have done a good job improving their HD video decoding engines. As we see, only a not very powerful ATI Radeon HD 4550 requires 21% CPU time on average to decode the scene from Alien vs. Predator movie. The new ATI Radeon HD 5700 needs even less CPU participation during MPEG-2 HD playback compared against the predecessors.

Summary

Without a doubt, the ATI Radeon HD 5700 series is a good choice for movie fans. High playback quality and HD video decoding support (also of two streams simultaneously) may them especially appealing. The only downside of the 5750 and 5770 models in the eyes of an HTPC user is that these cards are equipped with active cooling systems. If you are looking for exceptional 3D performance and DirectX 11 support, ATI Eyefinity and other innovations offered by ATI Radeon HD 5700, but you also would like to have a very quiet graphics card, then maybe you should wait until ATI’s partners, such as Gigabyte Technology for instance, will offer their own Radeon HD 5700 solutions with proprietary passive coolers onboard.