In a past posting, I complained about the lack of performance with the Microsoft HD-DVD player under Vista when trying to play HD-DVD movies on my dual core Athlon system. Since that posting, I have learned a few things;

First of all, decoding the H.264 HD-DVD stream requires a lot of processing power. It can take a moderately high end Core 2 Duo processor to about 70% – 80% utilization when viewing really complex action scenes. It unfortunately can completely overwhelm my poor Athlon 4800+ dual core – maxing both cores out and causing frame drop. For testing, I use the King Kong HD-DVD that shipped with the Xbox HD-DVD player and I jump to one of the action scenes – the one where the heroine is sacrifices to the gorilla. You would think that with a reasonably high end NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS card, this would be powerful enough to handle the decode.

You would be wrong.

The GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX line of cards were released towards the end of 2006 in anticipation of Vista as they were the only cards at the time capable of Direct X 10. Of course as anyone who has been paying attention lately knows, there are no Direct X 10 games out yet. On the plus side, the 8800s are fairly fast cards so purchasing them was not a total loss. Now, NVidia knew that they needed to get some graphics cards into the channel at a below $300 price point. Enter the 8600 chipset. Not as fast as the 8800, fewer processing pipelines and less memory, however Direct X 10 compliant with one additional feature – on card H.264 decoding for HD content. The bottom line on this feature is that it takes the load of doing the HD-DVD (or Blueray) decoding off of the processor which means that it is now possible to watch a High Def DVD on your system without experiencing frame drops.

There are two versions of the 8600 chipset – the 8600 GT and the 8600 GTS. Unlike with the 8800 series, going from the GT to the GTS does not buy you any more stream processors – both versions of the card come with 32 stream processors (a significant departure for the 8800’s 96 and 128 processors). The difference between the 8600 GT and the GTS is one of speed – the GTS is clocked higher, but other than that the two cards are mostly identical. There is one significant difference to watch out for: According to NVidia, while all 8600 GTS cards are HDCP compliant, for the 8600 GT cards, HDCP compliance is left up to the vendor. This is something worth checking out. I would not recommend purchasing a card that does not support HDCP because you are almost certainly going to want it if you want to use a modern big screen TV that has HDMI inputs.

I went with the MSI 8600GT – Since this is a media center PC, I did not care that much about the speed, plus I can always overclock my MSI to approach the 8600 GTS speeds. I could have gone with an even cheaper 8500 card, which is even slower, cuts the stream processors to 16 and used DDR2 versus DDR3 memory, but I was not sure if it would have full HDCP compliance, and for the extra $20 or so, I wanted a card that was at least capable of playing games if I wanted to on my big screen. The MSI ran me about $100 after rebate from NewEgg.com

I had one more hurdle to get over before this setup worked. In my prior post, I mentioned that I had decided to go with the Nero HD-DVD/Blueray plugin for $25 as opposed to shelling out $99 for Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra. After much trial and error, I came to the conclusion that Nero was unable to offload the decode tasks to the video card. There is a checkbox in Nero Showtime that tells it to use hardware for the decode, but it does not appear to work with high definition content. I purchased a copy of PowerDVD Ultra and was rewarded with a significant decrease in CPU utilization as the 8600 GT picked up the decode tasks. One thing I did discover is that Cyberlink now offers a $79 upgrade if you have version 6. While the install claims it looks for a retail version of PowerDVD 6, I used a version that came on a disk that accompanied one of my DVD burners and it seemed to work fine – your mileage may vary though. One other advantage of PowerDVD is that the transport controls (Play, Pause, etc.) on the Media Center remote work while playing movies with PowerDVD.

One thing that was interesting is that for some reason, I do not need Slysoft’s AnyDVD-HD to play a High Def movie under Vista anymore. Not sure why that is the case – it may be that the 8600 is automatically down converting the signal since I need to use component video as opposed to HDMI since my TV lacks an HDMI or DVI port. Don’t know, but the HD-DVD looks pretty good. I should probably rent the DVD version of King Kong and do a side by side test. If however, Vista does give you an error saying that it cannot play the content because the encryption chain is broken, AnyDVD will take care of that problem for you.

So, at the end of the day, the costs came to $100 for a new video card (I should be able to eBay the 8800 GTS card that was replaced for more than that, so that is a wash) and $79 for PowerDVD. Assuming that you already have an 8600 or an 8500 card in your system, the cost to add HD-DVD to your media center would be $80 – $100 for PowerDVD plus $180 (or less – see Amazon) for the Microsoft HD-DVD player. Grand total of $279 – $379 depending on whether or not you need a new graphics card. Seeing as standalone HD-DVD players are now being advertised for $299 (no 1080p) to $399 (with 1080p), it may not make sense shelling out almost the same amount to add it to your system. You need to be the judge.