Part 4: Avivo HD vs. PureVideo HD

Decryption Benchmarks: Hardware vs. Software Decryption

We were curious to see if using Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD to defeat hardware AACS encryption on the Blu-ray disks would result in any difference in CPU usage. We have noticed that graphics cards seem to have a much easier time playing back high-def video files that aren’t encrypted off of the hard drive, so we thought we’d run this test to see if using AnyDVD to remove encryption would give us a performance boost.

We tried all three codecs with and without using AnyDVD HD on both the Radeon and GeForce motherboards with the following results:

Clearly, defeating the AACS encryption with AnyDVD HD provides no CPU usage benefit or detriment on either platform, but it was a worthwhile test to perform. Now we know for sure.