Nividia 8500/8600 Cards

[fyodor]

Hi,

I am contemplating upgrading to one of the new Nvidia 8500/8600 boards and had a few questions that I was hoping that the seasoned regulars could help me with.

1. Does the new all-hardware decode work with mpeg2 content? I know that in theory it should not take a particularly powerful system to decode mpeg2 content, but those of us who use our htpc's to record/watch HDTV know that in practice it can be difficult to get stutter/judder free playback even with a heavily overpowered system. There has been some speculation that more of a "closed system" all hardware-decode solution would work better.

2.Along these lines, what type of applications can access the this new all-hardware decode? Is it performed at the driver level so that it can be utilized by MCE, SageTV, beyondtv, etc, or do you need an application that "knows" how to access these features.

3. I understand that ATI is also coming out with a series of video cards with similar features. Are the answers to #1 and #2 different for these cards?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[gplasky]

It doesn't do mpeg2.

Note that the offload NVIDIA has built into the G84/G86 GPUs is hardwired for H.264 decoding only; you get none of the benefit for MPEG-2 or VC1 encoded content. Admittedly H.264 is the more strenuous of the three, but given that VC1 content is still quite prevalent among HD-DVD titles it would be nice to have. Also note that as long as your decoder supports NVIDIA's VP2/BSP, any H.264 content will be accelerated. For MPEG-2 and VC1 content, the 8600 and 8500 can only handle inverse transform, motion compensation and in-loop deblocking and the rest of the pipe is handled by the host CPU; VP1 NVIDIA hardware only handles motion compensation and in-loop deblocking. ATI's current GPUs can handle inverse transform, motion compensation and in-loop deblocking, so they should in theory have lower CPU usage than the older NVIDIA GPUs on this type of content.

Gerry