My colleague Donald Karlov did a A/B compare for me showing the quality improvement for scaling between Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and the new Silverlight 2 RC0. Check this detail of a shot from an encode I did of Big Buck Bunny, scaled to 2.5x (640x360 to 1600x900 – a pretty common scaling ratio for full-screen playback on a smaller LCD or a laptop).

Silverlight 1.0 through Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Silverlight 2 RC0 and later

Note the improvements in detail, and the elimination of some stray pixels at the edge of the butterfly wing. Most shots won’t be as dramatically improved, but all will be helped at least somewhat.

And even with the better quality, playback CPU load dropped by 10-15%, due to better perf in the scaler and decoder.