NVIDIA WON'T leave the video sector of the market without a fight. ATI is very loud about H.264 support with its upcoming R520 "Fudo" card and demonstrated its abilities already in early June at Computex. Nvidia still hasn't demonstated that it can do it but is about to do so soon. We learned that release 80 of Nvidia upcoming driver is going to have support for H.264. We still don't know which cards will have the support for this very demanding codec but we expect that Nvidia will start with the high end and will then scale down. You can download 80.40 leaked beta at several places now but I am not sure it will work at this point as it is beta. We saw some documents where Nvidia claimed that its cards will be able to offload a lot of work from the CPU, while playing WMV-HD content. Please bare in mind that this standard defers from the original H.264 High Definition (HD) codec and specification. Nvidia claims that will have some kind of acceleration but we believe at least for the start it will be for 7800 GTX only. We expect more information about this soon. With Nvidia Purevideo Nvidia's 6200, 6600 and 7800 generation of the cards will play WMV-HD content at close to 50 per cent of CPU time. Without pure video acceleration, WDM-HD will take the whole 100 per cent of CPU time. We still need to see this to believe it and this information is valid for 1080p resolution WMV-HD file played at Athlon 64 3000+. This comes from Nvidia documents so we have to be a little sceptical. We are in the middle of the WMV-HD and H.264 High Definition (HD) file testing in some of our lab machines and we will get you some scores soon. The first tests show that you can not play H.264 High Definition (HD) at 720 resolution while you can get approximately 15 FPS while playing 480 file, we will get you more details as soon as we finish. As for WMV-HD you can play 1280x720 file on the same machine. So when release 80 driver is ready, you will finally get some HD acceleration. Source: The Inquirer
