The HD2400 and HD2600

HD MEDIA PLAYBACK

Since we officially now are in the “HD-age”, having good quality HD-decoding and playback is becoming more and more important. Slowly HD-players for the PC are coming down in price and since you can hook up a $200 Xbox 360 HD-DVD already I expect more and more soon will get one of either formats also for their computer.

Regardless what we think of it there are some things that need to be present for the HD-playback to work fine in Vista. Both the playback device and the display device need to support HDCP (copy protection) so that no-one can take the signal and copy it. This is where the HD2400 and the HD2600 HDCP support come in. Since the HDCP support is built-in the chip all the HD2400 and HD2600 cards will have the support. The situation is different for NVIDIA’s cards. Here you instead have to make sure that the card you are buying supports HDCP. Many of the cheaper cards will not support it which means they will be useless if you want to hook up a HD-player to them. Unfortunately I found this out the hard way. I earlier this summer bought a Leadtek 8600GT card to have as a reference. I forgot to check if it supported HDCP and it turns out it does not. Another 8600GT card I have in waiting for a review from Sparkle does not have HDCP support either.

Planet Earth – CPU usage test

To test the CPU usage when playing back a HD-DVD movie I choose to play 5 minutes from one of the chapters on the excellent Planet Earth HD-DVD. The CPU usage was recorded for each card. The chapter selected was “Shallow Seas, chapter 3”. During the 5 minutes, the bitrate fluctuated between 10-33 Mbps.

Both the HD2400XT and the HD2600XT perform very well when playing back this VC-1 material. The CPU usage, as you can see, fluttered around 15-30%. In contrast the HD2900XT now performs markely worse than when I tried it early in May. Now it gets around 60-70% CPU-usage, a clear sign that something has changed in either the drivers or the patch for PowerDVD Ultra. The HD2900XT does not have the UVD chip and instead is supposed to help offload the CPU a bit through its shaders. But AMD clearly has some work to do there. As mentioned at the beginning of this section I could not test any of my 8600GT cards as they did not support HDCP. My ASUS 8800GTS though did and as you can see it performed very well in this test matching the HD2400XT and the HD2600XT.

HD HQV Benchmark

HQV is a company that makes discs that help you test the video quality of either the display device or the player. We’ve used their HQV Benchmark DVD in several articles before. They have now released a version for HD-DVD and Blueray. AMD was kind enough to provide us with a copy so we could use it for this article.
To find out what the HD-DVD tests and how the score is set, please read their latest Testing and Scoring Benchmark guide at http://www.hqv.com/benchmark.

As you might understand the scoring is subjective but I’ve tried to be as fair as possible when setting the scores. The max total score is 100.

Oh dear. What is wrong with NVIDIA's cards? Neither performs that well and even if you could argue they should have a point more here and there due to the subjective nature of the scoring, theys till are far away from scoring anything close to what the AMD cards are capable of. While not scoring a perfect 100, the AMD cards are not far off from that.

To be honest though, just because the GeForce 8800GTS scores 0 does not mean it looks like crap when playing a HD-DVD. Planet Earth still looks great. But in my opinion it looks better on the AMD cards.

UPDATE 2007-07-13. NVIDIA sent me a new pre-release Vista driver and with that driver the GeForce 8600GT now scores a perfect 100 in the HD HQV test. The chart above will be updated with new scores for the GeForce 8600GT and 8800GTS in a few days.

POWER CONSUMPTION

As these new CPU's are built with a 65nm process you expect them to use much less power than a card like the HD2900XT. and that is of course true. In fact, they use so little power that they do not need any extra power at all. That is quite nice, especially for the HD2600XT and should make people who are planning on using one of these cards for an HTPC excited.

Total system power usage.

At idle the HD2400XT uses by far the least power of all cards. The HD2600XT seems to use a bit more than the GeForce8800GT. At full load the picture is the same although the GeForce 8800GT now uses almost the same power as the HD2600XT.