Saturday, January 17, 2009

Via C7-D HD Playback

Today's post shall be brief and to the point.

At the urging of a certain Singaporean friend of mine, I checked whether the Via C7-D could playback HD content. The answer is a resounding yes.

With the current 181.20 drivers for the Sparkle PCI8500GT and using Mediaplayer Classic Homecinema, I was able to playback the 1080p Quantum of Solace trailer with an average CPU utilization of 20%. Considering the CPU is the performance equivalent of a Pentium III, this is quite good.

While not all HD content can be accelerated on the GPU, this in general means that an aging system can be used for the playback of BluRay content if one desires to do so. With the dropping price on DXVA capable PCI video cards (50$ for the PCI8400GS), this becomes a viable solution for the living room even on a system without AGP/PCI-E slots.