Actually very few Blueray discs uses H264, some studios have experimented with using H264, but the majority of content (including the best quality discs) are still using MPEG2 ...

Was not there some news a little while ago that Nvidia tweaked their drivers to alter the actual quality for this test?? when the actual quality nvidia was truly producing was much worse.

found the link:

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&t sk=view&id=2777&Itemid=1

Its form FUD but they have good results to back it up.

About the format war, it references a "recent" report that is over two months old.

Two cards are missing from this review. The 8600GT and 2600Pro.
They are probably the best value card that can handle all the media playback with a budget CPU while being notably cheaper than the 8600GTS and 2600XT. And they are low power.

Anton and Alexey,

Thank you for this work. I appreciate it. I have some questions and suggestions. First, what was the significance of PowerDVD Ultra 7.3 Build 2911 to the results? Why did you choose this particular playback software? Are there alternatives?

Second, would you consider repeating these tests using a 45 watts CPU in place of the 75 watts X6800. A BE-2350 or maybe a BE-2400, overclocked to 2.4GHz would be nice, if you could put your hands on one. If you would, would you please report on the total system power burn for the competing graphics configurations, the number of system fans and the level of audio noise? Would you concentrate the selection of video cards to those with fanless coolers, where available? I know that these suggestions imply a lot more work, but the answers would be most helpful to me.

Finally, do you have information on the availability of the announced LG GGC-H20LI and GGW-H20LI ODDs?

Would love to see the same tests run with a mainstream priced CPU to see how the utilization numbers scale. e2140, e2140 overclocked, e6550, e6550 o.c.'ed, vs the current test for example.

Great test, but 2600 pro and 2400 pro would have been nice to see in the test also.

And also it would have been interesting to se the results with a 6550 eg or a similar "low-end" cpu and in m-atx perfect for HTPC, eg. some of the new G31 boards.

This is a great article. It would be nice in a follow-on article to have a matrix of different video content types and video players and quality/cpu load indicators in each matrix cell. This sort of matrix would be a useful reference to see what video card (and driver version) using what player is "best" for particular content types.

Outside of better video performance(??? is this true ???), the new DX10 cards seem to be a step backwards in utility. If they are shown to only have better video performance on content types that are not used by most people, it would be interesting to know.

Good article,woul've been better if test included onboard solutions like intel X3000,ati X1250,nvidia 7050 etc..

I am a little disappointed in this article becasue it does not really make valid points. The auther bases their conclusions on hqv, and cpu use separately, but does not really understand the relationship between the two. Admittedly, this is a very complicated subject and I only understand a small subset of it because I had to work with the hd2400 and hd2600 in order to get any acceleration to work, and especially had trouble with mpeg2 HD. The cpu use on the new gen cards is often higher because they are doing more processing to the image to determine the best deinterlacing available. The hd2600 card in particular allows the use of the most advanced vector adaptive deinterlacing on mpeg2 HD. This additional processing tends to take additional cpu as well. Again, i am not an expert, but there is much more to this than HQV tests and cpu useage.

The article also fails to describe why the hd2600 and hd2400 fail to provide full acceleration on VC-1, and why the cpu load is high on 1080p h.264. The drivers seem from ATI seem to be crap, and NVidia offers a better, more stable solution for their next gen cards. You gloss over these driver issues and even tend to recomend the ATI cards, but I can tell you from experience, that these cards' drivers are not ready for prime time, as evidenced by your test's lack of full VC-1 acceleration (cpu shoudl be around 5-10% if it is working) and the problems with your h.264 1080p acceleration where cpu should aslo be around 5-10%. Really, I can't tell what went wrong with your test from the lack of information provided about some of the files.

One more thing, this article needs proofreading for proper grammer and english.

Interesting article, but the testing of the 8500 GT isn't completely correct, since NVIDIA didn't add HD offloading to the 8500 GT until the 163.44 driver release (according to driver release notes).

I think that the card would test significantly differently if you ran it with updated drivers.

Actually, it looks like the 163.44 driver would help the 8400, 8500 and 8600.

Here is the excerpt from the Windows Vista 163.44 release notes:

New Features
• Added HD video post‐processing for H.264, VC‐1 and MPEG‐2 HD
content on GeForce 8500 series products.

Crap. That should have read:

New Features
• Added HD video post processing for H.264, VC1 and MPEG2 HD
content on GeForce 8500 series products.

Note that VC-1 format is part of both HD-DVD and Bluray.

Would just one reviewer somewhere stop using high end cpus when testing HD on gfx cards please! I and many other read these reviews to see what cards will perform well in a HTPC, and only a moron would put a C2X in one of those. Try the review again with an E2160 please.