Movie Playback

Movie Playback - Most reviews I read these days all seem to focus on 3D performance. And that mkaes sense yes, however, 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 anyway (seriously you are not even half way through the review yet, did you grab a  cup of coffee already?).

Images taken with GeForce4 Ti from the movie: Austin Powers - Gold Member - JPEG compression makes it a bit fuzzy.

Basically, all you need to know is that playback is now truly at a level that can compare equally with ATI's Radeon playback. DVD playback quality was good and performance wise handled at videocard level as CPU utilisation during playback is very low.