3d HTPC To Run Full 1080p SBS MKV

Just about any GPU from the current generation with and hdmi1.4a port can do BluRay 3D acceleration, outside of the standardized BluRay though, I consider Hardware acceleration waaay overrated using hardware acceleration on such files guarantees bugs, artefacts or crashes : that's what happened to me so I switched these feature off a few years ago and never tried them again.

Here is my personal full SBS copy of AVATAR at 1/2 BluRay bit rate, the file is read from an other computer over a 100Mbps LAN. (you don't even need Gigabit, but seeking takes a few seconds though)
Playback software is VLC, my graphics card does not support H.264 acceleration at that resolution, so it's done entirely on the Core 2 Quad CPU.
Notice how the CPU is underclocked, you've got a decent quad core CPU, your CPU shouldn't have problem decoding these files, you might need to do some codec clean-up and even codec priority management in the registry to make sure your video player uses the codec you want (the free decoder from FFDShow should work fine) and not those crappy hardware accelerated ones that come with Windows 7 or most GPU drivers nowadays.
If you want to be sure, just try some of these files on your current system just to see how is you CPU load.


Just remember that in order to output the full resolution to your hdmi1.4a projector, you'll need an hdmi1.4a compatible graphics card and use a playback software capable of outputting through the 3D API of your graphics card (AMD HD3D or Nvidia 3D-Vision/3DTV-play API). I know that "Stereoscopic Player" does support them but I don't know about other video players since my 3D display doesn't use these APIs.