Go 7900 gs enough for HD DVD?

I'm thinking of buying an Xbox 360 external HD-DVD drive but I'm not sure if I'm going to b able to watch HD-DVD's with my current video card. Would my mobile card be powerful enough to push those visuals? What about this whole HDCP dealy, will I be able to watch HD-DVD's on my laptop's monitor?

 

Actully watching a HD DVD or any HD content is 98% you cpu and 2% your gpu....

The exception to that rule is with the few handfull of video cards that can offload the work from the cpu with hardware processing, most nvidia cards can do it, but you need to buy purevideo to do it with HD computer content. as for a DVD that uses PureVideo HD, and I am not so sure if thats free or not, and only the recent release of cards have it advertised to be supported.

 

As the Xbox HD DVD player connects to your PC via USB, it will be even more CPU intensive than GPU intensive. However, as long as your computer isn't infected with viruses or spyware, it will be able to run HD movies content just fine.

 

need to buy purevideo??

Anyways. purevideo isn;t something you buy its an extra processor on your graphics card or the ability for your graphics card to offload some or all of the video decoding to the graphics card from the CPU.

Currently there are 3 variants.
Purevideo 1: which was introduced with teh geforce 6 series and allows for decoding of mpeg1 & 2. but a few models had support for a small portion of VC-1 & H.264 to be decoded on the gpu aswell.

Purevideo-HD: was intoduced with the high end geforce 7 series eg. 7900 cards. And added a dedicated processor to the card for processing 2 of the 4 stages in decoding H.264 video. 8800 series cards also have the purevideo-HD chip.

Purevideo2: Which can be found on geforce 8400, 8500 & 8600 series cards is teh newest version which is an upgrade of the Purevideo-HD chip to allow the graphics card to process all 4 stages of the H.264 video decoding.

All of these start working automatically if you are using nvidia graphics card drivers.

So basically seeing as your 7900gs card has exactly teh same method of decoding the movie stream as my 8800GTX I would guess when playing h.264 video at 1080p resolution you should have between 20 & 30% CPU usage (I get 10-15% but my PC is quad core). To give you a comparison my old laptop that does not support any of this purvideo stuff or the ati equivelant can't play 1080p it sticks at 100% CPU usage and drops about 25% of the frames and thats a 2ghz pentium M.

So you should be perfectly fine with that graphics card it should play perfectly. Although if you had a card that supported Purevideo2 you would probably only have about 5% CPU usage while playing.

 

PureVideo is not free.

The decoder has a 30days free trial, after that $$$$


But the decoder says "GF FX,6,7" so it might be different with the GF8 but this is not the sace here

 

I bought PureVideo for XP a while back. I wonder if it'll work for Vista. I'm willing to drop $60 on WinDVD if it enables me to play HD-DVD's. Does anyone know if I'll have any issues playing HD-DVD's on my laptop monitor since I have no clue if it's HDCP or whatever compliant? Does it have to be compliant?

 

Right, now that HDCP/ICP stuff is not enabled for HD-DVDs.

 

this just gets more and more complicated.

I've been doing some research and as it turns out. There is actually more like 3 versions of the purevideo hardware and then purevideo-HD is something different.

OK so we have the 1st purevideo which is on geforece 6 series cards and low to midstream 7 series cards which can do a bit of Mpeg-2 decoding and requires the purevideo software to work.

Next we have the second version purevideo2 which is on teh geforce 7900& 8800 series cards which can do 2 of the four stages in VC-1 & h.264 decoding. This also requires teh purevideo software for it to work.

Next we have a new one which has no real name beacuse they all also have purevideo-HD support so they just say they have that. But in reality they upgraded the purevideo2 hardware to give new hardware that we can call purevideo2.5 or sometthing that allows the entire decoding process to be some on the graphics card currently 8500 & 8600 cards have these processors on them.

Now along with all of these diffrent processors for decoding we have purevideo-HD which is HDCP complient circuitry so that you can play protected content (this basically means the card does all the post processing so that the decoded stream can't be picked up anywhere and hence keeps teh decoded content secure). And is also supported in the nvida drivers so any graphics cards with the purevideo-HD circuitry does not require the purevideo software to work as it is enabled in the graphics card driver. Currently all of the geforce 8 series has this purevideo-HD circuitry including the 8800 cards Also some later 7900 series cards also have teh purevideo-HD circuitry (so you my be in luck). Also it is currently only suppoted under windows vista but say they are adding XP support later. The reason for this I belive is that vista as one of its requirements needs protected HD content to be totaly secure to play and windows vista itself will lower the quality if any part of the video playing process is not secure (beacuse of stupid DRM reasons). XP on the other hand does not care about that so will let you play at full resolution without the entire processing being secure.

So currenlty in XP you need to buy the purevideo software to gain the purevideo advantages. And under vista you need to buy the software if you want to use it on a card without purevideo-HD. If you have a purevideo-HD card however it will automatically work if you have one of the newer sets of drivers installed(teh current certified ones only support 8500 & 8600 cards but the newset beta drivers support the 8800's aswell so mileage may vary with drivers).

here is the list of purevideo-HD graphics cards:
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_pvhd_build.html

 

I already said it. Pure video is for the things you would have saved to your computer hdd, I dont remember the exact codecs but its all the main ones.


PureVideo HD is for HD DVD and Bluray disk's and that one I dont know if its free and included in the forceware or if its just a part of purevideo if you use a 8000 series gpu.

But yes you do have to pay for purevideo, a 30 second trip to nvidias page would tell you that where you have to pay to download the full version of it.

All of that stuff is just ways to help your cpu out by making the gpu take some of the work, you can avoid the whole mess by getting a computer with a strong enough cpu to decode HD content on its own with no help, also there are several different decoding codecs on free players like MPC that will lower the cpu load nearly as much as PureVideo.

 

enough. Toshiba qosmio and sony VAIO (BD) use GeForce 7600, which is less powerful then 7900

 

what does that have to do with anything?

 

Not free? Heh, that depends...

 

It is free with any purevideo-HD hardware eg. 8000 series and some 7900 cards. Read my last post it explains all.

 

the quesiton was not how or what software is used to run it, if just the 7900gs is enough to run it, which it is if a 7600 can run it. so the quesiton has been answered.

 

When I got my 7900GT a ways back, pure video was a joke, I couldnt believe they were charging for it, I do believe its free now for 8 series cards 8600 and lower.