Benchmarks - H.264 decoding

With the trials going on in Britain, Singapore and other parts of the world, new decoding technologies are still far from perfection. So far, from what i know, most of the H.264 AVC decoder resposible still requires high speed processors to be able to decode it real time at full frame rate.

In this test, we recorded a 15s clip off air at 1920x1080. We played the clip and recorded the CPU utilisation levels of the different boards with PowerDVD 7.0.

With the integrated graphics on board, the CPU utilisation is always around 90-100%, taking up all CPU resources in decoding the H.264 transport stream. With the ASUS En7900GT graphics hardware acceleration turned on, it dropped to close to 30% on the average.

Although 945G does not support Clear Video, the X6800 is fast enough to playback CPU intensive H.264 AVC streams. One would want to wait for the 965G integrated chipset for such decoding purposes. Otherwise, pair it up with a ATi or NV high end card should help to offload the CPU to decode these Transport streams.

Next >>>