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

[sanderh]

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.

[Rusty257]

ctrl+alt+del - task manager - performance

play movie with HWA enabled, stop, check CPU usage

play movie with HWA disabled, stop, check CPU usage

mine depends on if its vc-1 or 264. with it enabled one of them dropped my cpu usage by half or so.

most systems are different, try it for yourself.