Playback Performance

High-End Graphics Cards

Modern graphics cards should have no problems playing DVD/MPEG2 streams, but we decided to check out the playback of MPEG2/MPEG2 HD in Microsoft Windows Vista because the new OS had already produced a number of surprises to us.

It seems that all graphics cards, except for the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT, handle the task well enough, yet it’s not so. As a matter of fact, the GeForce 7950 GX2, and every other graphics card with a 7900 series chip, cannot play a MPEG2 HD stream really well despite the seemingly low CPU load. It is skipping frames and producing a jerky image. Thus, the GeForce 7900 series doesn’t suit for playing MPEG2 HD today.

The CPU load is high for each graphics card in Windows Vista due to imperfect drivers.

The CPU load is high during playback of both a freely distributed 720p clip and a HD DVD movie The Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift . It is especially high for ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and GeForce 7950 GX2. There must be some flaw in the drivers for this particular application. Meanwhile, the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX has quite acceptable results.

The CPU load is always low when we’re dealing with 720p format, except for the GeForce 8800 GTS, but when it comes to 1080p we can see that top-performance graphics solutions have in fact no hardware acceleration of video decoding.

There are no problems with playing DivX streams, except that there is no hardware acceleration for DivX 1080p. There are no definite leaders or losers here.

The popularity of WMV HD format is declining, yet we publish the results for the comparison’s sake. You can see that the CPU load level is roughly the same with each graphics card, except for the notorious GeForce 7950 GX2.