Media Playback

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.

3D Blu-Ray playback is a relatively simple affair on AMD/NVIDIA 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 1% for Blu-Ray 3D hitting a maximum of 1.9% which leaves plenty of resource free for tasks to be run in the background when using NVIDIA hardware.

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


YouTube HD
In our second playback test we look at 1080p video on YouTube using Google Chrome and the latest Flash Player.


HTML 5 Web Performance
On our last performance test for this review we have taken a look at HTML 5 performance using Google Chrome and the Wilderness Downtown project page. This ultra-demanding video page is a stern test for any processor/GPU and is an interesting indication of future performance in web content.


For our web performance tests there the GTX 560 Ti compares well with the more expensive Radeon 6950, exceeding it at YouTube HD playback and performing at a near identical level in demanding HTML 5 tasks.