HD-DVD Playback - On the Xbox 360 & on NVIDIA GPUs

A Look at PC Performance: The Test

As with last time, we will be focusing on the impact of GPU hardware acceleration on decoding HD-DVD movies. Right now, the only players we have access to that support Blu-ray or HD-DVD playback don’t offer any type of frame rate or dropped frame counters, both of which make it much easier to compare CPU performance. We will be taking a look at the performance of different CPUs in our next major CPU review whether we have the tools we want or not.

CPU utilization does work well enough as an indicator of the capabilities of the GPU, provided we choose a fast enough CPU to eliminate any bottlenecks. For our purposes, once again, we will go with Intel’s Core 2 Extreme X6800. We could have used a less powerful CPU, as our HD-DVD movies proved to be less stressful on our hardware than the Blu-ray movies we've tested, but we stuck with the X6800 for consistency with our previous article.

As we mentioned previously, we will be looking at benchmarks using Serenity and The Interpreter. Serenity is a VC-1 title, while The Interpreter is encoded with H.264. Remember that most HD-DVD titles currently available are VC-1, but the move in the future will likely be towards H.264.

With Serenity, we benchmarked a scene in Chapter 15 during which an epic battle ensues and our heroes are trying to escape from both sides. The Interpreter benchmark takes place in Chapter 13 during the aftermath of an explosion on a bus. These scenes were selected because they tended to yield higher bitrates than many of the other scenes, though none of the scenes had the same type of huge increase in bitrate that we saw in X-Men III.

The software we are using is unfortunately not as mature as our Blu-ray player. Cyberlink's current HD-DVD beta player is based on PowerDVD 6.5 while the Blu-ray player is based on 6.6. There are a few things missing like bookmarks, and (unfortunately) ATI GPU support. Try as we might, hardware acceleration would not remain enabled when testing with ATI hardware. We have contacted both AMD and Cyberlink to confirm the issue, but until we get a fix we will have to do without ATI numbers.

For reference, here's our test system once again:

And now on to performance.