dedicated vs. integrated

couple of questions. if it matters, i have the nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M (128MB) and the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 (256 MB) in mind. in addition, i will not be playing any games whatsoever.

1. I know that nVIDIA has purevideo and that intel has clearvideo. Will there be any noticeable difference in video quality between the two on a wxga+ notebook screen? Any difference when outputting to an hdtv?

2. What is the likeliness of any software that does not need a dedicated card now to need a dedicated card within the next 4 years? It's probably a silly question, but microsoft forced a 3d graphics card (although relatively low end) with aero.

3. i think i read that aero is offloaded to dedicated graphics cards. i read it a while ago and am wondering whether integrated graphics cards have advanced to the point that aero can be offloaded to them too. if they're not, what's the cpu usage?

4. can all dual-cores pretty much easily handle full hd without help from a dedicated graphics card? What would be the cpu usage be on for example the Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 (2.0Ghz, 4MB, 800Mhz)?

 

Integrated video will be fine for no games and watching HD movies. My super cheapo C100 does well enough playing Hd movies out of the VGA port, and it has a celeron M and GMA900 integrated card. I am running into issues playing anything above 720p with my celeron, but have not had any problems playing 1080p movies on faster laptops with integrated graphics.

No quality difference when spat out of the VGA port, GMA900 HD looks just like X1400 Hd out of my T60.

Dual cores see about 15-20% usage with 720p, and 25-30% with 1080p. I really dont see movies or further operating systems causing any problems.

 

I get up to 100% usuage on certian kinds of 1080HD it really depends on what there encoded with and an the codec you use to view it.

This is a single core btw but 2.8ghz worth of single core.

 

My old 2.8ghz p4 would struggle with most HD stuff, where my celeron m and core 2 duo processors ate it for breakfast.

 

yeah but im running a opteron 148 ^^ @ 2.8ghz thats equal to about a 4ghz + P4

I get no playback issues at all but I see spikes of 100% useage on my task manager with certian types of material. Not just 1080 its only just one of the formats its encoded in, like bluray stuff close to 30mb/s.

WMP is bad for this, MPC does great and sombody recomended nero showtime, I love the playback on neroshow time, but I have no sound on certian formats (most of my hd apple trailers...)

I actually havnt tried to play and HD stuff yet on my Vista x64 install I should see if the cpu load is diffrent, maybe I just have codec issues on my XP install.