Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Originally posted by: Rollo
From what I understand the PVPs aren't broken, just not being utilised at this point.
Is this
specifically about the PVP in the 6800 AGP, or only generally speaking about hardware-accelerated video-playback, more specifically about using an NV-branded DX9 card to utilize the shader units to allow for hardware-accelerated "enhanced" DVD/Mpeg video playback? In other words, will it make a darn bit of difference for playing back and/or encoding WMV-HD content, in terms of reducing the load on the host CPU?
From what I've seen /heard, this is all GF6 series GPUs, and will make a big difference playing/encoding WMV-HD content.
I've known that the latter has been in development for some time now, before even this whole 6800 AGP PVP controversy, and that it was intented for inclusion in some upcoming version of NVDVD. I just hope that NVidia isn't using it as a way to cover-up the (alleged) lack of hardware functionality of the 6800 AGP PVP, by releasing it and pointing, "Hey, look! There's your hardware-accelerated video-playback feature!". While that is technically true, it doesn't in any way prove/disprove the defective PVP issue, if it is using the shader-unit hardware for acceleration instead.
What I've seen is in direct contradiction of this, but out of curiosity, why would this matter? If nVidia programmers could figure out a way to make a capacitor on the pcb perform the hardware acceleration, what would you care if the end result was the same offload from the cpu? That doesn't make sense to me:
Your argument is basically: "I don't care if some other area on the chip can perform the advertised functionality with a software update, it only matters to me if the PVP on this card can do it."
Unless you work at ATI, or expect to be using the shaders to play HL2 while you're encoding your home movies?
What would be really interesting, is to use a kernel-debugger and step through the drivers, and see if the 6600 cards perform differently than the 6800 AGP hardware does. Perhaps someone with both of the cards, and some experience doing this, would be willing to look into this issue in more technical depth?
Again, what would the difference here be?
The 6600s are a later design than the 6800s. If they had a more advanced PVP, would that be a bad thing? If the 6800 can offload 50% of the processing work and the 6600s do 65%, I personally wouldn't consider this the crime of the century.
If you do, you should start rallying all the 9700Pro owners to start storming the gates of ATI- their GPUs have a smaller instruction set and less efficient occlusion culling than the 9800Pro! Willikers!
:thumbsup::wine::beer:
