VC-1 playback

One of the most exciting aspects of the RS780 chipset on the AMD 780G boards is that it incorporates the hardware decoding of VC-1, H.264, MPEG2 with it's UVD technology that was formerly available on discrete graphics cards. With it, you can offload the CPU and let the chipset with integrated graphics handle the decoding.

We tested two HD-DVD discs, the first is the The Bourne Supremacy and the second disc is the HQV HD Test Disc. Both titles are encoded in VC-1 format playback using XBOX HDDVD drive.

As the three boards used the same chipset and same drivers, the results will be more or less similar.

Results

With the disc Bourne Supremacy, we were able to get a pretty low CPU utilization of around 15%. This was never possible with older generation of IGP.

With the HQV HD disc, the CPU utilisation is even lower, we achieved an average of 9%. That is under 10%.

With this low CPU utilisation, the CPU can be offloaded to handle other tasks. That would also indicate that you do not really need a very powerful CPU to power up your HTPC.

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