Hardwarezone on AVIVO vs PureVideo HD

[Geo]

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=2161&cid=11&pg=1

A couple of unanswered questions re the status of acceleration of AVIVO under Cyberlink, but they generally seem to find that PV HD has the edge right now for h.264 and VC-1 acceleration performance.

In our tests, the GeForce 7600 GT appears to be the card better suited for HD playback compared to the Radeon X1650 XT. On low bitrate H.264 movies and low overhead formats like VC-1, the GeForce 7600 GT manages to offer better performance because PureVideo HD scales with GPU core clock speeds. It is apparent that the Radeon X1650 XT is unable to handle 1080i/p video as well as the GeForce 7600 GT because of AVIVO's method of video processing on ATI's GPU. Generally speaking, you would need a Radeon X1800 and above class card to match H.264 decoding performance with a 500MHz GeForce 7 series PureVideo HD video processor. In this respect, NVIDIA's PureVideo HD has the upper hand purely in terms of price/performance over ATI's AVIVO if you're sourcing for a card just for a Blu-ray/HD DVD entertainment system.

 

[wishiknew]

I really wished they test with a second higher end ati card to see the effects of pipeline scaling does to cpu utilization. Maybe it wouldn't do any better but how would they know from testing just 1 ati card?

 

[London Geezer]

I was watching a .mkv file last night (Heroes if anyone asks). I think it was a H264 file at 720p but it stuttered a bit sometimes, especially at the beginning. Then for about half an hour it just ran smoothly. I think the file was a bit corrupt - to the point that at a certain time it locks and i lose about 5 seconds (having to fast-forward the video otherwise the player just locks if i get to that point while playing the file normally).

I have a laptop with a Core2 Duo 7200 (2GHz) and an X1700. I would have thought that would be more than enough to play a file like that. I do think the file was just a bit messed up... It also had a few instances where macro blocking was evident for a split second on fast paced pans.