Unless you like movies played back "slideshow" style rather than moving video style, you should avoid buying Intel or NVIDIA graphics chipsets, alleges AMD.
Playing back a BluRay disc on Nvidia or Intel-based machines could result in ‘slideshow’ style playback rather than moving video, warns AMD.
Chipmaker AMD has demonstrated what it calls the “wheel of fortune” effect of playing DVDs on NVidia or Intel chipsets. It’s called “wheel of fortune” because every time you buy a BluRay disc, you’re taking a gamble on whether the video has been encoded using the H.264 CODEC or the VC-1 CODEC.
AMD says its graphics chips are the only ones on the market capable of doing GPU-based decoding of VC-1 encoded discs. Consequently, if you try to play a high definition BluRay movie encoded with VC-1 on a PC using Intel or NVIDIA graphics hardware, CPU usage will shoot up – possibly to 100% of both cores, especially if you have other software running on the machine at the time.
At a technology update event in Singapore, AMD demonstrated to APC the difference between a Radeon-based PC and a PC using another manufacturer’s graphics chipset. Playing a VC-1 DVD on the Radeon PC was completely smooth, while on the competing manufacturer’s PC, rendering frame rate of the video dropped to about one frame per second.
About one in four BluRay DVDs uses VC-1 encoding, according to AMD – and most do not state on the box what encoding standard the video uses.
VC-1 is a video CODEC initially designed by Microsoft and is the arch-competitor of the H.264/AVC CODEC. It’s the official video format for the Xbox360, which is no great surprise – ATI designed the graphics processor for the 360 before its acquisition by AMD, and evidently this technology has been migrated into the company’s PC GPUs as well.
Dan Warne attended AMD Technology Update Singapore as a guest of AMD.