Feature Articles

The Great Avivo/PureVideo HD Showdown

By Vincent Chang - 15 Feb 2008

Virtual Trip: Yokazura and Superman Returns

Virtual Trip: Yokazura

 Yokazura can be quite a stern test for your hardware, despite its 1080i resolution.

 Yokazura with a single core Pentium 4 and a Radeon HD 3850 256MB with hardware acceleration enabled.

Before we look at the results, let us clarify that the screen shots taken here for all the movies during testing were not for our main test system but for additional testing that we'll elaborate later. This was a single core Pentium 4 system with a Radeon HD 3850 card, so please do not be confused by the CPU overhead numbers on these screens. (There's no need to squint and try to make out the numbers.)

Despite only being 1080i, the high constant bit rate of around 25Mbps on this HD DVD movie could give the CPU a serious workload and the high 66.2% CPU utilization when hardware acceleration was disabled supports that. However, the two HD decoding technologies are also up to par here, with similarly low CPU overhead. PureVideo HD seemed marginally better than Avivo HD but then with such small differences, both are effectively the same to the end-user.


Superman Returns

The bit rate in this Blu-ray, VC-1 encoded version of Superman Returns varied mostly between 10 - 20Mbps.

We tested the CPU overhead during the exciting scene involving Superman saving a falling airliner.

Compared to Yokazura, this Blu-ray blockbuster had varying bit rates that meant its average was much lower. What is of interest is that since it uses VC-1, we can finally see if Avivo HD and its additional entropy decode support for VC-1 would pay off here. And it does seem to be the case, as the almost 8% difference in CPU utilization is simply too large to ignore. ATI evidently has the better VC-1 decoder here. So if you happen to use an old system for HTPC needs, ATI's solution should be the most evident choice.

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