Where does the PureVideo stand with GT200?

[lopri]

AnandTech published the preliminary test of GT200's H.264 encoding capability.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3339

This is definitely a nice feature, albeit ahead of time and more of a proof of concept for now. I don't think it's going to be terribly useful for SD contents, but for Blu-Ray transcoding this will be a god-send. However, it will be quite some time before ripping Blu-Ray is in a more acceptable fashion - for obvious reasons.

This brought me an arguably more important question wrt GT200 - HD decoding (playback). Curiously this information is missing with most GTX 280 reviews. What exactly has GT200 improved when it comes to video processing? The only bits that I could find are the card now passes 5.1 DTS audio (not really about video processing), and that VP2 engine now supports VC1 and WMP (bottom of the page) Still, I wasn't able to find any test result showing its performance or quality of the playback.

Granted, PureVideo is quite decent in its current form and the VP2 engine in G92 has been reviewed before. But the competition is already a step or two ahead.

http://img71.imageshack.us/my....image=rv770hd26hd8.jpg

Apparently RV770 supports TWO streams of simultaneous HD decoding. (I also heard that RV770 could decode 1600p and beyond.)

And since now we know that NV has incorporated the VC1 support, I'd like to see how it performs as well as overall desktop 2D/3D performance under Vista. Just a suggestion.

 

[ChaosDivine]

Damn good question. I've sort of given up on HD vid acceleration since all sorts of muckups occur (graphics vendors lie or have a limited implementation, only certain software player (and maybe even specific versions) work, etc.)

I'll just throw a core or two at the problem for now and wait until acceleration becomes more ubiquitous

 

[BassBomb]

I am pretty sure it just has the same as G92 did, which was not as impressive as ATI 3xxx

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: BassBomb
I am pretty sure it just has the same as G92 did, which was not as impressive as ATI 3xxx

Meh, it's all about the same. Other than VC-1 decoding, both the UVD and VP2 decoders could fully decode compliant video streams with very little CPU overhead and solid image quality. Other than scoring 100 on the HD-HQV test (which has more to do with drivers than the hardware), there's not much left to do with decoding; things like dual stream decoding are relatively trivial (just add another unit, they're cheap).