Movie Playback

Movie PlaybackMost reviews I read these days are about is technical specs and 3D performance ? Yes, in general we do basically use three overall features from a videocard, those are of course play games, use it as 2D interface to interact with an operating system and ... a much forgotten item in reviews nowadays is of course multimedia/movie playback. In a previous review of I believe it was GeForce3 I stated that NVIDIA should take a good look at ATI when talking about dual monitor setups and movie playback through the S-Video connector. Well, NVIDIA did that and more ..

Seriously, movie playback over video-output has improved heaps over previous generations. I can start stories about what and why this has changed, the new driver 'tweaks' bob and weave interlacing etc ... But basically it's all way too much blah blah and well, this review is already a tad longer then our normally also way too long reviews.

 
Images taken a GeForce4 Ti from the movies: Red Dragon, Enough, and Kylie Minogue 2003.

Basically, all you need to know is that playback is now truly at a level that can compare equally with ATI's Radeon 7500/8500 playback. DiVX playback quality was good and performance wise handled at videocard level as CPU load was about 3-4% over measured over the entire system which is excellent. Then again, this was an Athlon XP 3000+ based test system.