AMD Athlon 5350 APU and AM1 Platform Review - Performance - DXVA Acceleration & Enhancing MKV 1080P Video

Accelerating & Enhancing Video

APU based platforms are a lot about additional features and performance on top of regular processing. So another key feature is of course the embedded GPU with video processor. The combo of the video processor and some additional shader processors inside that chipset allows for high-definition 1080P content playback, acceleration, and though limited... enhancement of overall picture quality. For those that use other content like the immensely popular MKV / x.264 container formats, please download Media Player Classic Home Cinema. This free open source software will DXVA accelerate and enhance your MKV content at 1080P or even higher. We have written an article on Media Player Classic Home Cinema and how to set up that software to make this happen, please read that here. 

Above an example of 1080P Muse in MKV x.264 format / DXVA accelerated of ver the GPU . You'll notice a CPU load of give or take 3% to 7% here, power consumption at this stage is roughly 30 Watts for the entire PC. We have some extra shaders enabled like complex Image Sharpening. Perfect playback. But let's try Ultra HD playback.

We also tested Ultra HD video acceleration. Above the 4K resolution Elysium Trailer, here we have an MP4 H.264 file and you can see that the CPU load is 52% with one core topping out performance. Unfortunately Ultra HD videoplayback resulted into stuttering. For both content we have additional shaders enabled like image sharpening and darkened black levels. 

The reason why we noticed stuttering seems to be that the trailer is not DXVA encoded. meaning of you where to RAW decode video streams over the CPU, it would not be powerful enough. The GPU at DXVA will take care of you on that here though.