CES 2006 - Day 2: Blu-ray/HD-DVD, PureVideo H.264, Viiv, Centrino Duo and a lot more
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on January 7, 2006 3:07 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
PureVideo to offer H.264 Decode Acceleration
Ever since ATI first demonstrated that their R520 GPU (Radeon X1000 series) could accelerate H.264 decoding NVIDIA had always claimed that they could do it as well. We had been asking for proof and today NVIDIA delivered on just that.
NVIDIA announced that all GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 GPUs will eventually (when drivers and software are available) support H.264 decode acceleration for all the way up to 1080p videos. Obviously the faster the GPU (mainly the more ALUs and the higher the clock speed), the more that can be offloaded from the CPU onto the GPU.
In order to prove the support was functional, NVIDIA setup a Pentium D 830 with a GeForce 6600GT and tried to play back a 1080p H.264 encoded movie. CPU utilization across both cores was basically pegged at 100% while the CPU handled the entire decode.
Enabling hardware acceleration offloaded a good hunk of the decoding task onto the Geforce 6600GT, reducing CPU utilization to around 50% or less:
In order to take advantage of the H.264 decode acceleration you will need two things: 1) Compliant InterVideo WinDVD, CyberLink PowerDVD or Nero software, and 2) a NVIDIA driver enabling the support.
NVIDIA promised that both of these items would be available to end users in the next 2 - 3 months. While they are definitely lagging behind ATI in H.264 decode acceleration, at least NVIDIA has finally provided us with a working demo of the technology and they have also committed to us that it will work on all GeForce 6 and 7 GPUs (AGP and PCIe).
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DeathByDuke - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
damn right,electronic paper!
yay!
itd be cool to open a book of encyclopedia britannica and have each page display scrolling text from each article, and videos for each article too, all stored on some multi Gb flash storage in the book covers
highlandsun - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
All of the new display technologies look really intriguing. And I think it's about time someone got Uhura's earpiece done right.ComatoseDelirium - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
-Great News For AGP Users, I heard many claims that H.264 decoding wouldn't be possible, and is "broken" on the GeForce 6 series AGP cards. Good to hear from the horses mouth (owner of a 6600GT).
BTW The article index is messed up, the correct pages do not appear, can someone confirm this?
s2kpacifist - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
Need...OLED display...now... I hope they fix the problem with the life of the blue soon.shabby - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
Definetly good to hear, but its wierd that the broken cards can decode h.264 but cant accelerate wmv9.I really hope this hddvd/bluray shit gets worked out, i have no intention of buying players from both camps. Could of swore i saw a company come out with a player that read both formats some time ago.
Cygni - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
h.264 is accelerated by simply "reprograming", if you will, the standard APU's and hardware on the card. No special stuff is needed. Theoretically, its possible with ANY modern GPU. Just gotta have the drivers to do it, assuming the cards got the juice to do it. The dead video decode engine on the early 6800 AGP cards was on the other hand a specially designed piece of hardware only for decode.Nobody Else - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
I believe that was Samsung that intends to come out eith a dual player.http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?se...">Samsung Player
Aquila76 - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
The index seems to be a page ahead (clicking on Page 16 brings up Page 17)