H.264 Decoding Performance
AIW Radeon X1900 was benchmarked against AIW Radeon X1800 XL for this test, each card asked to decode three H.264 AVC videos, each with high-ish bitrate, under Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Hardware acceleration is provided by Cyberlink's trial decoder, found here.
R580 offers up a small advantage in decoding assistance in our H.264 test, indicating that the Cyberlink decoder can additionally find extra performance over time, through more aggressive use of the shader hardware where applicable. Currently, the decoder offers little over a decent CPU, although that's something for a different article.
