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Our PureVideo HD test system came from NVIDIA as a preconfigured machine:

Silverstone SG01-Evolution MicroATX Case
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
ASUS P5LD2-VM i945 motheboard
1GB PC-5200 DDR2-RAM
MSI NX7600GT Diamond Plus DVI/HDMI
Toshiba TS-L802A Slim HD-DVD drive
Antec Neo420W Power Supply
Windows XP Professional SP2
PowerDVD 6.5 HD-DVD Edition (Sept 22, 2006 Build; H.264 Decoder Version 1.7.0.2120)
Forceware 93.71

We compared CyberLink’s software decoding with CoreAVC 1.1 Pro.

NVIDIA provided the following HD-DVDs to test:

1. SwordFish (~20 Mbps VC-1, 1080p24)


2. Virtual Trip: Yozakura (~26 Mbps H.264, 1080i30)


3. True Blue (~15 Mbps H.264, 1080i30)

The last two discs are imported from Japan. Virtual Trip - Yozakura is part of Pony Canyon’s “Virtual Trip” series of HD-DVDs which showcase Japanese cities. Pony Canyon is famous among audiophile circles as producing some excellent music CDs and this disc shows that they have brought that same attention to detail to these HD-DVDs. True Blue is produced by Columbia Music (founder of DENON; not Columbia Pictures) and Toshiba. This is also a demo disc that has video footage of undersea creatures. Although the average bitrate is small, the complexity of the underwater scenes represent a substantial challenge to the H.264 decoder.

We added our own test clips to the mix:

1. ATSC MPEG-2 HDTV Broadcast, 19 Mbps MPEG-2, 1080p24


2. H.264 Satellite Broadcast, 19 Mbps H.264, 1080p25

These test clips are standard transport streams with AC-3 audio, meaning they will be less computationally intensive in comparison to the HD-DVDs (which must do AACS decoding, audio mixing, and deal with more complex H.264 encoding).