VLC Playback (No GPU Acceleration)

Without GPU acceleration it's interesting to see what effect CPU and memory performance have on system playback loading. The two AMD systems are pretty much identical, despite one being single channel and the other dual channel memory - the efficiency of the directly connected memory and identical CPU provides an identical result between the two.

The Zotac set up with its poorer memory performance yields a slightly higher result than the Intel G45, although there's not much in it and both are nearly 20 percent more efficient than the AMD CPUs.

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.



If it's one thing the GeForce 9300 IGP does well, it's Blu-ray playback. Both the AMD and Nvidia chipsets excel here with very little power use because they have ample shader power to hand. The G45 features just 10 unified shaders and barely plays it completely fluidly hitting 98 percent usage at most, requiring a lot of CPU time to fill in on top of Intel's ClearVideo. With a more efficient CPU than AMD, the Core 2 Duo/GeForce 9300 combination offers a lower CPU use than the GeForce 8200 with the same shader power.

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.