Video Decode Performance - High-bitrate AACS-protected VC-1 via HD-DVD

Performance was measured with PVHD active and inactive by means of the Hardware Acceleration checkbox in WinDVD 8.0. There's no news on what other players will support PVHD going forward, or whether the acceleration will be made available to any player application that asks for the common DXVA interface.

Performance with acceleration active - G84 @ 2560x1600

The black bar represents our tool tracking when the WinDVD application was running. As you can see it was running almost the entire time the tool was measuring performance. The percentages shown are the average utilisation per CPU core (we used a dual-core Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800), with the percentage in brackets the average performance while WinDVD was being tracked.

As you can see, average utilisation was 17% or less for each processor core. The unaccelerated case is next.

Performance with acceleration inactive - G84 @ 2560x1600

Average CPU utilisation with acceleration disabled was much higher over the same time period, showing that PVHD support on the GPU was being used. As a small note, average power consumption (measured at the wall) over the two runs was 2 to 3 watts less with acceleration enabled.

Performance on GeForce 8800 GTX - G80 @ 1280x800

G80 is limited to 1280x800 using the Dell 3007 panel for HDPC protected content.

Note performance is still higher on average than the G84 unaccelerated at 2560x1600.