When it first launched YouTube video quality was known for it’s low quality, but at the time we didn’t really care, as our dial-up internet was charged by the minute, we wanted our video’s quickly and cheaply.
How day’s we have multi-megabit, paid per month, broadband and as a result we now want our on-line video’s and TV-On-Demand at a much higher quality, and in some better than the quality we get on TV, but even though our broadband came serve us these video’s just as fast as we can watch them, can our Graphics Cards cope with the higher video quality of service’s like YouTube HD?
I have two PC’s that I use for watching on-line video’s, both with separate video cards. One, my basic machine, has a Celeron(R) processor running at 2.66GHz’s, 768MB of Ram and a 128MB nVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 Graphics Card
Now both can play the test video below at full screen in standard def, but the basic machine with it’s 128MB Graphic Card can only refresh the screen around 4 times per second. Where as the main machine, with it’s 1GB ram, can still play the HD version without any drop outs in full screen, as long as the second monitor is not playing anything, at which point both screen slow to 5 or 6 refreshes per second.
So why not test your Graphic Card out with Miranda Lambert’s Live Performance of ‘More Like Her’ at the Country Music Awards?
To make it a fair test of the Graphic Card and not your broadband speed, click play to start caching the video, hit pause and wait for the video to fully cache, click full screen, and then click the play button again. The video should already be selected to play in HD, if the HD logo is not RED, click on it to get the HD version.
Don’t forget to let me know via the comments as to what Graphic Card you have, and how it coped. Don’t forget to include the screen resolution i’s set to.
Thanks, and enjoy the video.
