hardware acceleration for 1080p material, is it needed or not?

[THX-UltraII]

I would like to know if hardware acceleration is needed/recommended for 1080p material. I ve read several post where HW acc. is discussed and is truly recommended for 1080i based material. However, I only watch 1080p content so is HW acc. really needed or even does have effect on the PQ or CPU reduction?

I m using a Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2,67GHz 4Mb CPU and have a 7600GS PCI-e card which has HW acc. support.

[jagabo]

The requirements for playing back 1080p and 1080i are pretty much the same. Your C2D should be up to the task of playing either if you're using CoreAVC Pro (the cheaper version is only single threaded). Not all players support DXVA, the Windows feature required to use hardware video decoding.

Playing 1080i material on my PC with hardware acceleration takes about 1 percent of the CPU (Q6600, 8600GT). Playing with software decoding (CoreAVC Pro) takes around 25 percent.

[poisondeathray]

Not all files are DXVA compatible either, it depends on the specific settings used when encoding them.

The 7800GS HW acceleration features an older version of PureVideo, and doesn't perform very well IIRC. It is missing a few features, that PureVideo HD has (found in some 8 and 9 series cards)

[THX-UltraII]

thanks guys