Blu-Ray Performance – Intel X4500HD Versus Radeon 4830 Part 2

Two New BIOS Versions for Better BluRay Performance

Last month I thought it would be interesting to compare Blu-Ray playback performance with the Intel DG45ID motherboard (BIOS v0081) and a Radeon HD 4830 graphics card to see how each would do with VC-1 and H.264 movies. The article went over well, but after it was posted I was contacted by both AMD and Intel letting me know both the motherboard and video card that I used had some BIOS issues that needed to be addressed by an update to both products. It seems that the BIOS that shipped on the Radeon HD 4830 had one too many of the SIMDS disabled and that the Radeon HD 4830 had just 560 stream processors enabled instead of the 640 stream processors that it should have been running. I quickly posted some new performance numbers showing what the additional 80 stream processors would do for performance.

Intel on the other hand informed me that even though I was using the latest BIOS at the time for the Intel DG45ID motherboard that the system wasn’t running properly. It seems that Blu Ray playback performance on the DG45ID motherboard with BIOS version 0075, 0079, and 0081 wasn’t right as Intel accidentally broke something in the BIOS and the result was that hardware acceleration was not working.

The Intel stance on G45 chipset and Blu Ray:

The Bluray HW acceleration in the G45 chipset does work when all of the appropriate ingredients are used (Application version, drivers, and BIOS). This is not unique to Intel’s offering – all IGP require the right app, driver and BIOS to achieve the expected Bluray experience. Intel has successfully enabled many of our OEM customers to offer properly configured solutions in their product offerings that minimize the CPU load for Bluray playback. In the case of DIY, it is important to have all of the right ingredients to get the expected Bluray capabilities. In this specific case, there was a BIOS change on DG45ID that has had an unintended adverse impact on Bluray playback, and that is now being corrected and new BIOS posted. Your findings are not a reflection on the actual product capabilities and we are taking necessary corrective action to deliver a great Bluray playback experience for our customers.

I just recently updated the BIOS on the Intel DG45ID motherboard to version 0085 (shown in the picture above) and without even checking the CPU usage I can tell that Blu-Ray performance is greatly improved, so once again an update needs to be posted as the performance results have drastically changed.