Great news for Nvidia card users from CES!

[mikesm]

Well, I stopped by the Nvidia booth today to chew out the folks there for their terrible HD support in drivers, and the whole lame way HD acceleration is working with purevideo.

Guess what. They completely agreed things were hosed, and have a plan for fixing it. In a couple months they will release their own directshow codec, not just for MPEG2, but also for VC-1 and H.264, that is designed and tested to take full advantage of Purevideo HD. It will be an integral part of the driver release.

First for Vista, and then for XP.

I asked specifically if they were going to support EVR only, or also VMR9 as well. The replay was "Well, you have to support VMR9 well under Vista, it's a requirement". Good enough.

We'll see if they do a good job here, but this seems ideal for Sage TV users. No more PowerDVD or WinDVD filters, funky configuration, and fighting between the codec and drivers.

They clearly seem to have heard there is a massive problem here and are taking pretty dramatic action to solve it. They were completely forthcoming about all the problems and that this was a major area of differentiation between them and ATI, and they are committed to fixing it, and soon. The poor guy dealing with the HD stuff looked like he had been beaten up the whole week.

Their new stereo 3D stuff was also very cool! If you have a good 120 Hz TV set (the LCD's probably won't work even if they are 120 hz), they have a USB connected box that sits on top of the set and is used to sync with glasses that switch on/off very fast. Each eye gets it's own 60 1080p picture. And the 3d effect does not need game support, since the card is already tasked to render the "Z-buffer" info. The games looked very good in 3D.

All very cool, and very good for us since Sage uses the directshow filters for MPEG2, VC-1, and H.264. This means Intel will be the only graphics card vendor to not ship it's own codec with it's driver, as ATI bundles avivo.