MPEG-4 (AVI) 720p High-Definition Playback

For MPEG-4 (AVI) playback we again used PowerDVD Ultra and again played the files from a hard drive instead of disc. The 720p trailer we used was for the movie, Ray, with a bit-rate of 3,336kbps in DivX 5 and two channel MP3 sound at 191kbps. For 1080p playback we used the Elephants Dream movie-short which is encoded at a bitrate of 9,998kbps and six channel AC3 sound at 448kbps.



The MPEG-4 acceleration of the Intel set ups is almost identical, with just a couple of percent CPU usage in it between both Zotac GeFore 9300 and the Intel G45. Both perform better than the AMD set ups too, which strongly indicates that the bottleneck is a particular part of CPU performance (which is uniform) or software. However, the difference between the Zotac GeForce 9300 and Jetway GeForce 8200 with the same shader horsepower is quite large in the 720p playback test.

WMV9HD Playback

For WMV9HD playback we again used PowerDVD Ultra and again played the files from a hard drive instead of disc. The 720p trailer we used was for the movie, Doom 3, with a bitrate of 6,790kbps and two channel WMA3 sound at 440kbps. For 1080p playback we used the The Living Sea trailer which is encoded at a bitrate of 9,847kbps and six channel WMA3 sound at 384kbps.



Again the two Intel set ups are faster and the Zotac is faster again by just a small margin compared to the Intel G45 in both cases. Again software or perhaps the greater shader horsepower in both the GeForce 9300 and 8200 are providing slightly better in the 1080p playback with their respective CPUs.