WMV9 HD DVDs
As previously mentioned, WMV9 is a one of the new standards for high definition DVD video and a few movies are already available in stores that have WMV9 versions. I bought a copy of “Terminator 2: Extreme DVD” and “Step into the Liquid”, a film about the surfing life style.
Terminator 2: Extreme DVD
Without the updates, the CPU utilization on the NVIDIA cards is just a bit higher on average than the ATI card, but what is interesting to note here is just how much the CPU is needed for HD video. We are using an FX-53 processor in our tests, and 38% of the CPU cycles are needed to render a video.
With the new DLLs installed, the 6600GT’s CPU utilization drops by 40%.
Step into Liquid
Again the NVIDIA video technology is using more CPU power than the ATI cards without the Microsoft Media Player updates.
Again we see a nice drop in CPU utilization, by 34%, with the updated media player DLLs.
