H.264 decoding dependent on monitor res?

[Aosh]

I just read the anandtech article on the extremely high CPU and GPU requirements of decoding H.264 HD movies. Now, if I had a 30" LCD, would I need an even more powerful CPU/GPU combo?

Or put in another way: is movie decoding dependent solely on the resolution of the movie or does the act of stretching the movie over a large screen also require a lot of CPU horsepower?

 

[MDE]

If I understand correctly, the video is decoded then scaled to your display's resolution. In that case then it doesn't really matter how big or small the display is, it's if your system has the horsepower to decode the file at all.

 

[Auric]

If the display resolution is higher than that of the video and being scaled up to fill by the GPU then it will use more of its resources but may be relatively insignificant. Actually scaling to the higher resolution in software can be very demanding on the CPU. Whether that is desirable depends upon the scaling quality without it.