Video Playback Performance

We used Media Player Classic Home Cinema - a free video playback software that enables DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA), which makes use of the hardware acceleration in our graphics chipsets.

We used the x64 version of the software, and had to disable FFDshow in the MPC-HC options to get DXVA working on the Intel and AMD machines. The Nvidia system, however, worked right out from the get-go.

These are the options within the program that you might need to check if you are trying it yourself:


You can check DXVA support by running this DXVA checker program, and checking for these options to see if h.264 is supported on your hardware:


Unfortunately, at the time of testing the AMD 785G with Catalyst 9.12 drivers produced this result when we tried to get DXVA enabled video playback working on MPC-HC (check out the bottom left corner of the picture). We're not the only one with this issue and we're still talking to AMD and trying to fix the situation, and until then obviously this gives us no AMD result.



The Intel CPUs have generally a couple of per cent lower CPU usage than the Nvidia on average, but there's not a huge difference at all, and between the two Intel CPUs they are very similar. Remember the Core i5-661 has a higher clock than the Core i3-530, meaning there's more processing power available so this means the overall average will be lower. All the systems produced a very smooth 1080p h.264 playback, though.