Video Playback Performance

Playing video in various formats at an acceptable speed is important for integrated chipsets targeted at home computers. That’s why all modern integrated chipsets have hardware technologies for decoding video content and improving its quality.

To check the performance of the tested graphics cores at reproducing various video formats we used Windows Media Player 10 with a patch that enables DirectX video acceleration for WMV HD content. The following videos were used:

• Magic of Flight clip (WMV HD, 1080p)
• A DivX clip (640x480)
• Video DVD with Sky High (PAL)

NVIDIA’s PureVideo engine shows itself in the tests. The CPU load remains very low on the GeForce 6150 and GeForce 6100-based mainboards during video playback, just like it is on the mainboard with the ATI Radeon Xpress 200. NVIDIA’s products are only better than ATI’s in just a single case, though ?when reproducing HD video in WMV format.