ATI Catalyst 9.11 New Features Analysis - PAGE 1

As my colleague Sean said, for the 9.11 release of the Catalyst drivers, ATI and Adobe teamed up together to offer hardware-accelerated H.264 Flash video decoding, thanks to the ATI Stream technology.  Although the new drivers apply to the HD 2xxx series and newer, one must use a Stream enabled graphics card. These are the discrete HD 4xxx and HD 5xxx series, as well as the integrated HD 3200, HD 3300 and HD 4200. In other words, such cards will be able to offload the CPU for Flash-based video decoding, like on Youtube.com or Hulu.com.

So why not test it myself? That's exactly what I did. Using mainstream components, I built a computer, different than Neoseeker's standard test platform, that would represent the average Joe computer:

• AMD Athlon II X3 435 2.9Ghz
• Gigabyte MA785GMT-UD2H
  
  • ATI HD 4200 IGP
• 2x2GB DDR3-1333 7-7-7-21
• Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

Upon installing the latest Catalyst drivers and the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 prerelease, I headed to Youtube.com to watch some HD videos.

The first one I watched was the '2012' trailer:

Using Windows' performance monitor, I measured the CPU utilization with and without ATI hardware acceleration:

As one can see, the CPU utilization was 7.2% lower on average, which is not too bad.

For the next video, I watched the Ninja Assassin trailer:

This time, the hardware acceleration did even better, reducing the processor's load significantly.