Today I was in the mood to watch some HD DVD, both for entertainment and test purposes. First I put in Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow ’cause I never finished watching it. During playback I took a look at the cpu usage and noticed it was at 75~86% (I have a 2600xt video card). I took a look at Power DVD’s video settings and I noticed that hardware acceleration was not checked. I was pretty sure that I had enabled it ’cause that was the first thing that I did when I put the 2600 in. I stopped playback and went to the video settings again, and the check mark was there for hardware acceleration. So then I decided to try The Dukes of Hazzard. Now cpu usage was between 54~67%. Next I tried Disturbia, because I got low cpu usage just the other day and wanted to see if I got the same results. This time I got around 6~14% (same as the other day). Also, with Disturbia I noticed that the hardware acceleration block was checked. Someone last week was asking me which HD DVD was I playing when I was getting high cpu usage, so first, the 2 movies I mentioned first (Sky Captain and The Dukes)…is the cpu usage typical for these 2 movies? My 2nd question is with the 2600 is PowerDVD capable of turning hardware acceleration off and on as needed? Why would it need to be turned off? I know with my 6600gt if I tried playing an HD DVD with hardware acceleration enabled PowerDVD would close and then give an error message. That I understand because the 6600gt is not capable of hardware acceleration for HD DVD. But I don’t understand why PowerDVD needs to turn hardware acceleration off and on according to what movie is playing. Please clarify.
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