13-Way NVIDIA VDPAU Video Decode Benchmarks

It's been a while since last putting out any hardware-accelerated video decode benchmarks of NVIDIA's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU). However, after updating qVDPAUtest to support building on modern platforms, here's a round of thirteen NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards being benchmarked under VDPAU.

The reason why VDPAU is seldom benchmarked at Phoronix.com is because measuring the video decode performance the numbers don't tend to be too interesting unless having very demanding and freely-available sample media. There's also a lack of VDPAU benchmarks with qVDPAUtest being an easy (and automatable; it's long been available via the Phoronix Test Suite) but it's sample video content is no longer too stressful. There also have not been any breakthrough innovations on recent NVIDIA GPUs when it comes to the PureVideo HD engine that VDPAU leverages for providing video hardware acceleration to Linux multimedia software.

On the following page are results for the GeForce 8500GT, 9500GT, 9800GTX, GT 220, GT 240, GTX 460, GTX 610, GTX 650, GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 770, GTX 780 Ti, and GTX Titan graphics cards when running qVDPAUtest with the NVIDIA 331.20 binary Linux graphics driver. All testing happened from an AMD FX-8350 system running Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64. Take the results as you wish; the results are mainly being put out for reference purposes and for interested users to reproduce using the Phoronix Test Suite.