NVIDA's PureVideo with H.264 hardware acceleration

NVIDIA's PureVideo H.264 hardware acceleration was officially announced today and there was much rejoicing. Why bog down your CPU with mundane video decoding tasks when your GPU can do it for you, right? PureVideo hardware decoding supports all of the standard MPEG-4 flavors such as H.264, VC-1, WMV and also supports the "soon-to-be-legacy"  MPEG-2 compression as well.  NVIDIA's PureVideo technology will show up in both desktop and notebook products: the GeForce 6- and 7-series will sport the new technology, as well as the nForce 6150 series of GPUs. Note that this should cover you in a PC solution for either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD since all of the usual suspects codecs are supported.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 2nd 2006 4:17PM]

It will be nice to see some benchamrks. Though nice to see 6600GT AGP cards support H.264 HD.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 4:52AM]

Looks like it supports most audio cards EXCEPT Creative Labs X-Fi

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 9:40AM]

nice to see this taking off, i will try in a few hours on mu nforce 430 / 6150 motherboard. maybe it will save some cpu power.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 4:06PM]

I ran this with my 6800Gs and get about 40-50% CPU with 720P and 50-60% with 1080P. i run a 3500+ with 1 gig ram

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 6:56PM]

Hardware capabilities are nice. But, you need the software to support them. ATI and NVidia have been marketing all kinds of cool video features like this, but delivering drivers/software is another thing.

This is especially true if you're in the Linux and Mac world, like me. Only NVidia supports MPEG2 acceleration in Linux. In MacOS, MPEG2 accel is supported in the Apple DVD player, but is not available as an open API for other apps (like HDTV playback software) to use.


Also - on the "legacy" MPEG2 thing.. MPEG2 is defined in the ATSC digital TV broadcast standard. It's not going anywhere for a long time. Internet video will be H.264 or any newer codec that comes along, Cable and Satellite will also evolve to the more efficient mechanisms. But, Broadcast TV will make sure that MPEG2 is here to stay.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 11th 2006 8:51AM]

PureVideo is all well and good but the sad reality is that none on the cards currently on the market from ATI or nVidia have HDCP/HDMI support. This means that even though you may have the processing power to pay 1080p if the content is protected you will either see nothing or a scaled down version of the content. Its a bit of a stitch up really.