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Message: <blockquote data-quote="globaldonkey" data-source="post: 214187" data-attributes="member: 49844">Thanks for the input and the testing charli181. Much appreciated. You've helped confirm what I was thinking about HD processor needs. My requirements are similar to yours, in that the system will be a dedicated HTPC, with the addition of making sure it can do 1080p HD. I agree, the faster CPU is probably the way to go to achieve this, and having priced up the Intel ASUS HDMI board and the one you have, there's about $300 AUD difference, so I probably will go the AMD option.You are right HD MPEG2 will run fine. It's only when you start getting into the AVC stuff that the higher performance becomes necessary. I am thinking the config you have will be fine so long as you stay away from ffdshow whenever you need to do HD H.264, or as you suggest, get hardware acceleration going. Alternatively, you may want to check out CoreAVC. From the link I sent you with the samples:Test System 1:AMD XP 2500+1 GB RAMNVIDIA GeForce FX 5700Resolution: 1280x1024720p Result: 23.9761080p Result: 11.916Test System 2:Pentium-4 3.2 GHz1 GB RAMATI Radeon 9800 ProResolution: 1280x1024720p Result: 23.9761080p Result: 17.136Test System 3 (Notebook):Pentium-M 2 GHz1 GB RAMNVIDIA GeForce Go 6600Resolution: 1280x800720p Result: 23.9761080p Result: 16.766The sample results above show that playback was perfect for the 720p clip on all the test systems. The 1080p was a totally different story, with none of the systems able to play back the clip at the full framerate.Please note that the ffdshow H.264 decoder used (libavcodec) is not the most efficient one around. The most efficient decoder at the time of writing appears to be the CoreAVC codec. The professional version of this codec will also eventually features GPU acceleration support, which is simply a way of using your (most likely very powerful) graphics card to help with the video decoding. CoreAVC is not freeware, but it's well worth checking out.GPU acceleration is already available in NVIDIA's PureVideo decoder (obviously for NVIDIA GeForce series 6 and 7 cards only), which is NVIDIA's GPU acceleration driver. ATI's version of PureVideo is called Avivo, which is actually free and available for the X1000 series as part of the Catalyst driver set (5.13 or later). You will require a separate Avivo compatible decoder, like the one PowerDVD uses (although it does not seem to be as compatible as ffdshow/CoreAVC).All of these decoders are still constantly being improved, and performance has risen along with each new version. Using an older Alpha version of the CoreAVC codec (considered by many to be the most efficient out there), I was able to play back the 1080p clip at full frames on "Test System 2", so it shows the importance of decoder efficiency.If you can already play back the 1080p clip at the full framerate, then you should be fairly confident that your system will be able to handle high definition DVD content. If it is only missing a couple of FPS for the 1080p clip, but playing back the 720p clip well, then there is still a good chance you'll be able to play back HighDef DVDs smoothly (at least at a down-scaled 720p resolution). If you can't even play back the 720p clip at full frames, then I think a system upgrade might be a good idea (although waiting a while to see what's up with Windows Vista might be a good idea, but that's a topic for another article).</blockquote>

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