CPU Usage Benchmarks: Radeon 3200 vs. GeForce 8200
Now that we’ve examined the image quality, let’s have a close look at raw playback performance. Are these integrated solutions fast enough at the 1920x1080 progressive resolution with a dual-core 4800+ CPU?
We’ll be testing these motherboards with three different Blu-ray disks, each one created with a different video codec: “The Fifth Element: Remastered” is our H.264 title, “300” is our VC-1 title, and “Tomb Raider” is our MPEG2 title.
First, we’ll examine the toughest codec to play back—the one that requires the most processing resources and is therefore the most difficult on the hardware: H.264.
At first look, it seems the GeForce 8200 is breathing a little easier than the Radeon 3200, but first looks can be deceiving. See how the Radeon is delivering more consistent performance and the GeForce is fluctuating wildly? What this is reflecting—and what you can’t see from this chart—is that even though CPU usage is below 100%, the GeForce 8200 is having trouble playing at this resolution and is dropping frames.
This frame dropping is obvious during playback on the 8200, but playback on the Radeon 3200 appears totally smooth. The frame dropping on the GeForce 8200 appears linked to the resolution; it does a much smoother job at 1280x720 progressive resolution (more on that later). But let’s finish looking at the CPU benchmarks using the other, easier codecs before digging deeper into this issue.
The old MPEG2 codec is clearly taking a much smaller toll on our graphics processors. Both solutions are playing back smoothly in this title. While the GeForce has a slight CPU usage advantage, it’s hardly worth mentioning. Finally, the VC-1 codec:
The VC-1 codec shows us similar results to MPEG-2, with the GeForce and Radeon providing nearly identical CPU utilization performance.
Frankly, while the CPU utilization numbers are showing a close race, we’re still concerned with the GeForce 8200’s frame skipping behavior we saw using the demanding H.264 codec. Let’s dig a little deeper into that specific issue by concentrating on the H.264 codec and seeing what happens at different resolutions.
It would have been nice to see a 780G board with sideport memory in this test (e.g. GA-MA78GPM-DS2H) as this is meant to improve performance.
Im shocked that they have chosen to use 1 dimm configuration.
both motherboards, due to the nature of the AMD platform, support dualo channel configuration to increase memory bandwidth, which would also have been enjoyed by the intergrated GPU's.
I know toms argue that the likly configuration in this set up would be 1GB, but if u were a self builder you would choose 2x512 to maximise the platforms abilitys.
not good imho.
^^
Or alternatively this was a test to see how well everything runs without dual channel support. You'd be surprised at the number of shop-bought systems that only have 1 RAM chip in them.
Nice article, I had been looking into using PureVideo with the GFX card I just bought.
Just one criticism: Using red and green lines for the charts on page 7 made it nearly impossible for me to tell which line was for which card, as I have deuteranomaly, which is a mild form of red-green color blindness. You should use slightly different colors for charts like that.