ATI and Nvidia insouciant about HD DVD and Blu-ray

dipdude

Forerunner
WE HAD a chance to talk to some of the movers and shakers from both of the biggest graphic camps and you are possibly astonished to learn that they don’t care that much about HD DVD versus Blu-ray fight.

Whatever happens in the HD DVD versus Blu-ray fight both camps are using marchitecture based on the H.264 codec. All ATI and Nvidia cares is that their chips can play H.264 faster and better then the rival side.

ATI did a good job with its 5.13 drivers that are supporting much of the advanced video features. ATI likes to call it Avivo and Nvidia is still working on it Pure video branded super video H.264 driver answer. That has jet to come but Nvidia was demonstrating its H.264 driver at CES 2006.

Nvidia is now winning in 3D performance fight but traditionally it loses in Video quality, DVD and now even it H.264 playback. You never know maybe green camp has some secret weapon / driver to gain the video crown for Nvidia but so far Nvidia focused more on 3D rather than video features. That is what its investors want I guess.

Nvidia is not as open about its opinion as it doesn’t want to step on many toes. Nvidia is trying to stay very much low profile when it comes to talking to the press. Please don’t ask me about G71 sir. If you talk loud about HD DVD you might upset Sony the father of Playstation 3 but if you preach Blu-ray too much big bad Vole could just be upset as well.

ATI chaps just feel relaxed to talk about it which surprised us a bit as the Vole kind of prefers HD DVD and the same Vole is buying a lot of ATI's chips for its XboX 360.

It was great to see the DVD graphic hardware acceleration on Pentium 2 at 300 MHz and a DVD drive machine but the CPU was much better choice than original Geforce or Radeon graphic cores. Acceleration was not that good back them, it took graphic chaps a long time but they got it at the end. It took them just a few generations to make good DVD hardware support.

Now we have dual core Pentium D 850, Expensive edition 955, Athlon X2 4800+ or not so cheap Athlon FX 60 to play your H.264 content.

The Geforce 7800 GTX 512 or Avivo powered X1800 XT cards will offer some help as well, if you get the right drivers and codecs. The choice is as always yours but H.264 is getting in our lives slowly but surely. It will take some time till it's everywhere. Let's say years not months.
 
Back
Top