3D Blu-Ray Playback

Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 3D is encoded in High Definition 1080p format using MPEG4 AVC compression and comes on a dual layer (50GB) disc. The aspect ratio of 2.35:1 is used with letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the 16:9 image. This portion of the movie has an average video bitrate of around 45MBPS and regularly peaks above this making it one of the most demanding Blu-Rays on the market. For comparison, a movie such as Casino Royale has a bitrate of 24MBPS.

Due to its compact design and ability to output 7.1 audio the XFX 5770 dual slot could make the ideal card for a media system and so we wanted to see how it would handle 1080p playback of a 3D Blu-Ray.

Setting up 3D Blu-Ray playback is a relatively simple affair on AMD hardware, just install the latest drivers then tweak the display settings to the preferred level and then run PowerDVD 10 which features support for Blu-Ray 3D and GPU acceleration for lower CPU usage.

With the GPU acceleration in place the CPU usage statistic is on average less than 2.5% for Blu-Ray 3D hitting a maximum of 4.6% which leaves plenty of resource free for tasks to be run in the background.

For further information on Blu-Ray 3D playback see our launch article here.