Video/Web 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.

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



3D Blu-Ray playback is a relatively simple affair on recent AMD/NVIDIA hardware, just install the latest drivers then tweak the display settings to the preferred level and then run PowerDVD 11 which features support for Blu-Ray 3D and GPU acceleration for lower CPU usage.

With the latest patch applied and GPU acceleration in place the CPU usage statistic is on average 1% for Blu-Ray 3D hitting a maximum of 2.1% on our GTX 560.

For our web performance test both cards perform well and even though the results are not quite as good as Blu-Ray 3D we still see some very low CPU use. It is also worth noting that a lot of work has been performed to optimise HTML5 performance in Chrome with GPU acceleration and the two cards being tested today now perform very well in this task.

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