Gaming
A lack of GPU horsepower confined us to relatively low resolutions and detail levels for our gaming tests. That's the price you pay for integrated graphics. We used built-in benchmarking functions to test Left 4 Dead and Far Cry 2 before switching to FRAPs for the remainder of our gaming tests. When using FRAPs, we recorded five 60-second gameplay sessions to ensure that our results were consistent and repeatable. Average and median low frame rates have been reported for the games we, er, FRAPsed.

Although the G41 isn't all that far behind in some games, it's clearly in a different league than the 785G. And while the 785G didn't exhibit any compatibility problems or visual anomalies, the G41 suffered from both. GRID simply wouldn't run on the G41 Express, and in Battlefield Heroes, in-game grass was obviously rendered incorrectly.

The 785G obviously fares better with sideport DRAM and faster system memory, but it's only notably faster in a couple of games. In fact, the performance gaps are greatest with older game engines, suggesting that GPU power more than memory bandwidth bottlenecks the Radeon HD 4200's performance with newer titles.

Blu-ray playback
We conducted our Blu-ray playback tests across three high-bitrate movies covering the major formats available on the market. 28 Days Later was used to represent the H.264 camp, Nature's Journey for VC-1, and Click (which it pains me to even admit that we purchased on Blu-ray) for MPEG2. The latest version of PowerDVD, which supports the decode acceleration built into both the 785G and G41 Express, was used for testing.

Playback was run full-screen over HDMI at 1080p resolution, a setup that initially proved a little problematic for the 785G configs and my Dell 2408WFP LCD monitor. At 1080p, the video output of both the Asus and Gigabyte boards was a little discolored, with blurry text to boot. All was crystal clear at 1920x1200, however. That's the native resolution of the display, but the G41 Express had no problems outputting a sharp picture at 1080p on the same monitor.

It appears this problem is specific to the 2408WFP. I just took delivery of a Dell S2409W LCD, and at its native 1080p resolution, 785G output over HDMI looks good.

Intel may support decode acceleration for all three Blu-ray formats on its more expensive G45 Express chipset, but the G41's decode assist is limited to MPEG2 content. At least it's quite effective there, delivering lower CPU utilization than either 785G config.

The 785Gs have lower CPU utilization with VC-1 and H.264 playback, with the latter proving particularly demanding of the G41 config. It appears that additional memory bandwidth helps to lower the 785G's CPU utilization during Blu-ray playback, as well. This difference is most pronounced with Nature's Journey, a 1080i title that we've previously seen be very CPU-hungry on systems with pokey memory bandwidth.

Of course, I should note that all three systems had no problems smoothly playing back all of the movies we tested. Even today's budget dual-core processors can handle HD video playback without the assistance of dedicated decode acceleration logic.