Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 512MB DDR3 Review

YouTube 1080P Performance (Adobe Flash)

With YouTube’s move to high definition videos, many viewers suddenly found that they could not watch the newer, better looking videos without their computer getting bogged down. Granted, this is mostly an issue for netbooks and laptops but there are still plenty of lower-end and dual and single core desktop processors out there which just don’t have the horsepower necessary to process 720P or 1080P content. This means more often than not, that HD video you are intent on watching quickly turns into a slide show.


Adobe’s Flash 10 does offer some basic hardware acceleration for HD video streaming from YouTube, Hulu and other online sources but the 10.1 version takes things to the next level by offering Flash video processing which is accelerated by the GPU. This frees up CPU resources, allows for smoother playback on low-end systems and also provides an added benefit of (supposedly) higher picture quality.


In this test we watched a random selection of 1080P YouTube videos ranging from IMAX trailers to movie trailers and beyond while logging CPU usage in the Windows 7 Performance Monitor. In total, the selection of videos accounted for about 15 minutes of playback time per test.


Unlike our tests with the Flash-based FarmVille game, it is quite evident that the move to Flash 10.1 has a pretty dramatic effect on the overall performance of high-def YouTube videos. While a savings of 15% CPU usage might not be much, it could be the difference between smooth playback and a distractingly jerky video.

Both the GT 210 and the HD 5450 offer much the same performance which ends up being better than the IGP on the i5 661 but still trailing behind the GT 200.


A Question of Improved Picture Quality…or not.

In their documentation, ATI claims increased picture quality when it comes to Flash-based video acceleration. Did we see any improvement with picture quality? Absolutely not during full motion playback but there seemed to be a very slight difference when the video was paused and we had time to thoroughly examine the picture. The differences were so small however that we doubt that you would ever be able to tell the difference.