Update in April 8: NV dev notice us they are currently working with Cyberlink to optimize CPU utilization when decoding protected MPEG2. The upgraded  driver for 8200 will be released in Mid April.

NVIDIA claims GeForce 8200 is the only 100% hardware decoding solution for h.264, VC-1, MPEG2

In NVIDIA’s marketing slide, they have said the upcoming GeForce 8200 mobo is the only 100% hardware decode solution for three major codec. In NVIDIA’s product line, till now there is no one can have 100% hardware decode. This is critical to entry market users.

So if NVIDIA’s slide is true that means we can use 8200 to play HD movie and CPU utilization keeps low. But when we are testing a Engineering sample GeForce 8200 earlier today we find it is not what we think.

When GeForce 8200 is decoding MPEG2, CPU usage climbs up to 17%

When we are playing VC-1, GeForce 8200 did a good job, lower CPU utilization to 5%. Also the H.264 hardware decoding is acceptable, a little bit higher than G86.

But the high utilization bar of MPEG2 decoding still shows us this GeForce 8200 is not a 100% decoding solution. We hope it is only a ES issue, they can fix the problem when it finally hits the market.