R520 supports hardware acceleration of H.264 video

R520 is the project name of ATI’s next graphic circuit and now it has published some official information on of the features. R520 will namely have hardware support for the video compression technology H.264. Thus technology is supported by both Blu-ray and HD DVD which means ATI is getting ready to meat the the demands of the future high resolution video signals and offer maximum performance at playback. H.264 will offer three times as efficient compression as the MPEG2-standard that the  DVD-format uses, and at the same time have an overall better image quality. ATI will present its R520-circuit during Computex 2005 next week and among others it will show how it handles H.264-signals in the hardware.

Source: ATI