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 the latest version of PowerDVD 8 Ultra (build 2021a) for playback and enabled hardware acceleration within the application. CPU utilization was logged for 60 seconds of playback with each movie, and the results were averaged. Movies were played back in fullscreen mode with the desktop resolution set to 1920x1080, or 1080p.

The GeForce 9300 is all over the map here. It has the lowest CPU utilization with our MPEG2 movie, but drops to the middle of the pack with AVC content, and into the back with VC-1. VC-1 decoding appears to be a weakness of Nvidia's PureVideo hardware, but even with 48% CPU utilization, Blu-ray playback was silky smooth on our Pentium E2180-equipped system.

After watching these Blu-ray movies play back on each integrated graphics platform, I'm confident that they all deliver comparable image quality. If you're watching commercial Blu-ray movies, there's no need to mess with the image post-processing features available in these IGPs.