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You can throw all the NVIDIA ION and Broadcom Crystal HD Enhanced Video Accelerators you want into netbooks and nettops. If you don’t optimize software applications to take advantage of those chips, you won’t notice any sort of performance improvements.

NetbookNews.de caught up with the folks from Cyberlink at Computex, where they were demonstrating a version of their PowerDVD software capable of playing 1080p video on netbooks and nettops running using both video acceleration platforms. If you tried decoding a 1080p movie with PowerDVD on a normal netbook with an Intel Atom processor you wouldn’t have much success, unless you call incredibly choppy video playback a success.

It doesn’t sound like Cyberlink is building support for NVIDIA and Broadcom’s hardware decoding into its main product yet. So right now you’ll need to get an optimized version of the software if you want HD video playback. It’s also possible that PC makers using these platforms could strike deals with Cyberlink to bundle PowerDVD with their netbooks or nettops.