HD Video playback
With HD DVD essentially dead, we confined our video playback tests to Blu-ray movies with the highest bitrates we could find for each of the format's three encoding types. For VC-1 encoding, we settled on Nature's Journey, which is packed with ridiculously gorgeous loops of nature scenes. On the AVC front (otherwise known as H.264), the highest bitrates we could get our hands on came with the fast zombie flick 28 Days Later. We had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for MPEG2, eventually settling on Click. For whatever reason, an Adam Sandler comedy is encoded with a higher bitrate than other MPEG2 movies.

We used PowerDVD 8 Ultra for playback and enabled hardware acceleration within the application. CPU utilization was logged during 60 seconds of playback with each movie, and the results were averaged. The movies were played back in full-screen mode with the desktop resolution set to 1920x1440 to make things as difficult as possible for the IGPs.

Although the GeForce 8300's Blu-ray playback is smooth and fluid, its CPU utilization is measurably higher than that of the 780G. Both companies claim 100% decode acceleration for each format, but AMD's approach more fully unburdens the CPU.

HD HQV video quality
We've added Silicon Optix's latest HD HQV benchmark to the mix to assess each chipset's HD video playback quality. HD HQV tests noise reduction, antialiasing, and various resolution loss scenarios, culminating in an overall score out of 100. The scoring system for HD HQV is entirely too subjective for my liking, and the weighting is a little odd, but it'll have to do for now.

The GeForce 8300 comes out way ahead here thanks to half-resolution processing cropping up on the 780G in the film resolution loss test, which costs the AMD chipset a whopping 25 points. To my eyes, the GeForce and 780G both fall a little short in the antialiasing test, as well.