Our first tests today concentrate on Blu-ray playback results using four movies and the three major formats. The Simpsons Movie covers H.264, Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds Live at Radio City in VC-1, and CRANK for the MPEG-2 crowd. We are also tossing in Wanted for its picture-in-picture capabilities although we tend to like the combination of Angelina Jolie, fast cars, and guns more so than the technical attributes on the disc.

CyberLink’s PowerDVD 9 Ultra is utilized for playback duties in today’s review and it fully supports the decode acceleration capabilities built into the 785G and G41 chipsets. We are still performing tests with a variety of commercial and freeware software applications. Additional test results will be available in our 785G motherboard roundup next week.



The Simpsons Movie –

H.264 Blu-ray Playback: Simpsons BD

 

H.264 Blu-ray Playback: Simpsons BD

 

Crank –

MPEG-2 Blu-ray Playback: Crank BD

 

MPEG-2 Blu-ray Playback: Crank BD

 

Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds Live at Radio City –

VC-1 Blu-ray Playback: Dave Matthews Concert BD

 

VC-1 Blu-ray Playback: Dave Matthews Concert BD

 

No real surprises here, since the Intel G41 chipset only supports hardware decode support with the MPEG-2 format. The G41 is not competitive with the 785G with H.264 titles but makes a decent showing in our VC1 based title. However, it does offer slightly lower CPU utilization rates in our MPEG-2 title than the 785G, unless you disable CnQ/C1E on the AMD platform.

The 785G DDR3 platform has the best overall power consumption numbers with power management features enabled. In the past, we recommended leaving CnQ disabled in order to ensure proper operation of the system and to avoid an overtly negative performance penalty, but those times have changed. Our 785G DDR2 system is voltage challenged in these tests as we had to manually set the CoreVid to 1.350V (1.332V real) as it would auto set to 1.392V instead of 1.325V. Undervolting the CPU to 1.288 worked fine in our playback tests but not in other benchmarks.

We did not note any substantial differences in playback quality between the 785G and G41, although we tended to prefer the 785G on our larger screens. It just seemed to have a slightly sharper picture even with all post processing effects turned off. We calibrated our monitors and TVs before each screening so a minuet offset in a setting could have affected our results, but our eyes always gravitated to the AMD setup in A/B comparisons.

Of course, the 785G offered significantly more video enhancement options than the G41 if you like to play with that stuff. Vector Adaptive de-interlacing, pulldown detection, edge enhancement, de-noise, dynamic contrast, color vibrance, flesh tone correction, and 1080P/24 were all working correctly in our latest driver set. Yeah, we know, it sounds too good to be true with an AMD driver set, but it worked this time for us.

Wanted-

H.264 Blu-ray PIP Playback: Wanted BD

 

H.264 Blu-ray PIP Playback: Wanted BD

 

One of the new features of the 785G is hardware assisted picture-in-picture playback capabilities, actually AMD simply states accelerated multiple streams in their specifications. All we know is that it works, and works perfectly with a variety of Blu-ray titles that feature PIP capabilities.




Hulu TV HD

Full Screen -

Hulu
TV HD: Legend of the Seeker

 

Hulu TV HD: Legend of the Seeker

 

1280x720 -

Hulu TV HD: Legend of the Seeker

 

Hulu TV HD: Legend of the Seeker

 

One of our favorite desktop applications is Hulu. We decided to incorporate this fantastic service into our benchmarks. Some might say that all you really need for decent Hulu playback is a fast internet connection and a system that actually cooperates well with Adobe Flash. We think a fast hard drive, lots of memory, and very good GPU is just as important.

The G41 offers the best CPU utilization rate under full screen mode when streaming our HD title. There is a reason for this; we had occasional judders and stutters during heavy action sequences or pan zooms that did not occur on the 785G platform. The G41 behaved better in 1280x720 mode but we still encountered the occasional stutter, just not as often.

Test Setup General System Performance
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  • HelToupee - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    How's Linux driver support for video decoding coming along for AMD? Last I checked, it was supported in the closed drivers, but none of the players support it yet.

    Poor Linux support is a deal breaker for me (and probably 10's of other people ;) )
  • Finally - Wednesday, August 5, 2009 - link

    [quote]Poor Linux support is a deal breaker for me (and probably 10's of other people ;) [/quote]

    If I was Google, I would ask you:

    Did you mean "10 other people"?
  • sprockkets - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    Same here. Buying a Zotac 9300 ITX board with an Intel chip. VDPAU ftw.
  • mczak - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    IMHO, the biggest drawback with G41 (and G43) isn't even mentioned - you lose two ram slots (some boards still have 4 but then you can equip all 4 only with single-sided ram, so useless). Hence this limits you for all practical purposes to 4GB (2x2GB) of ram. (The chipset could take 2 4GB modules but for that price you could probably buy 2 G45 boards with 8 2 GB modules...)
  • Spivonious - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    Some other items...

    The G45 has the X4500HD, the G41 has the X4500. The G41 does not have hardware decoding for blu-ray movies.
  • flipmode - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    Is that some kind of double negative? Maybe "fewer and fewer" or something? No biggie, it just caught my eye immediately :smile:
  • Sharles - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    The ICH7 chipset on my motherboard does have 1 PATA channel.
  • Viditor - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    Agreed...Gary, you need to correct your table at the index. ICH7 has 1 PATA (2 device) connetion.
  • iamezza - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    There are no graphs showing up on page 5
  • R3MF - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link

    AMD are making a lot of fuss about 785G/Tigris supporting their next generation Stream computing initiative (read: OpenCL), would you be able to ask them if they intend to provide this support to the 780G chipset too?

    This is important because the 780G will form the core of 2nd gen ultra-mobile platform previously known as Congo.

    I would be very grateful if you would ask this question.

    Thanks

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