Test 2: VC-1: Planet Earth: Fresh Water Chapter 1. Planet Earth is encoded in High Definition 1080p format (VC-1) which results in discs with 30GB of content. The aspect ratio used by this disc is 1.78:1.
It is fair to say that absolutely nothing has changed in terms of CPU use when comparing the GTX+ and 4850. The provide the exact same performance as the GTX 280 and 3870 X2 and so the Radeon still has the best performance in this area. In terms of Image Quality there is scope for change however and this is something we will be looking at in an upcoming article.
When we last looked at graphics cards from Nvidia and ATI we covered some new developments on the Nvidia cards such as acceleration of a second stream and Blu-Ray playback with Aero enabled. In PIP playback mode we noticed that Nvidia significantly outperformed ATI at the time however as the above results show ATI now has that aspect of their products running well when PowerDVD is combined with Catalyst 8.6, the result being better performance than Nvidia can deliver.
The situation surrounding Aero Playback is however a bit less clear cut and, if we are honest, it is currently quite a mess.
Up until recently, getting the latest Nvidia cards to combine Aero with HD playback was easy. Simply install the most up to date Forceware driver and a build of PowerDVD 7.3 such as 3730. If Aero was automatically disabled with this configuration, changing the registry entry “NVDWMON” to 1 was a simple solution. Despite PowerDVD having a similar switch for ATI hardware (ATIDWMON) enabling this switch resulted in a blank display and so we were limited to playback without Aero.
The ability to take advantage of this functionality changed with the release of a more recent patch for PowerDVD, build 4102. Due to an AACS issue Aero Playback has been disabled and is no longer possible on Nvidia hardware, regardless of the driver or card used. Having contacted Cyberlink we were informed that they intend to add support for Aero playback again at a later date, when the AACS issue is resolved. There is also the added twist that the recently released PowerDVD 8.0 also currently lacks support for Aero playback of Blu-Ray content on any card.
We also took this opportunity to speak to both ATI about their inability to have Aero playback enabled in PowerDVD builds such as 7.3.3730 and they informed us that the Radeon 3000/4000 series is capable of this functionality and information on how to implement this has been passed to Cyberlink but it has yet to be enabled by them. Whist ATI seem to be laying blame at Cyberlink we do feel a little more proactive developer involvement could have had this technology up and running in some form, after all Nvidia seem to have worked well with Cyberlink in this regard.
To be fair though, we also feel that Cyberlink could be much more forward thinking in their approach to the whole situation. It is clear that we have two major manufacturers who are ready to implement this feature yet Cyberlink do not have this as a priority and the result is that consumers are made to put up with a sub standard user experience when trying to play their high definition content.
Our recommendation for the short term is that when using Nvidia G92 based hardware, where possible; stick with PowerDVD 7.3 build 3730 for the best visual experience on Windows Vista.
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