You need R520 to power it...

ATI  is focusing on video with its R5x0 generation of cards. Nvidia just introduced the G70 and even though it's the fastest graphic chip in the market, we would like to see it running H.264. It is the next generation video codec and will be heavily used for HD content. It is all going toward HD, especially in the US and Canada, while Europe is just too complicates to make it happen there. Too many countries with too many standards and no one wants to give up its own. Some people call it tradition but it's more like stubbornness.

ATI demonstrated the R520 runing HD content with 30 percent of CPU load much faster than before, if you run it on a card that don’t have hardware to support it, you will have your CPU 100 per cent occupied with this video decoding option. You should run R520 against older cards such as X800 or X700 generations or 6600 or even 6800 from Nvidia. Of course once when R520 sees the light of day.

We also learned that H.264 can be done in shaders or with plain software, but your CPU will do most of the work.

If you do it with software, your CPU use can easily go to a maximum load of 100 per cent and will stay there.

Shaders can speed up things as you can help decoding HD content in Shader pipes but if you want to do it right you need to have and use the dedicated part of the chip that is able to process these algorithms.

We know that R520 has it but we still don’t know about Geforce 7800GTX. I would like to see 7800GTX running HD content and Nvidia claims that even older cards can do this decoding with some 30 per cent CPU load. I need some proof to support these claims.

One question still remains unanswered. When are we going to see R520 in hands of journos or should we say in the market? No one seems to know the real answer.

HDTV, HD-DVD and Blueray are the future and you kind of need some part of hardware to help it decode H.264 content. That comes soon we hope, as DVD and its MPEG 2 are just not too good anymore.


Source : TheInquirer