GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 series from NVIDIA has, as you may know, a chip called Pure Video, which takes care of the video functions of the card. This chip has support for a whole lot of nice features but there is no support for hardware-acceleration of H.264-signals yet. ATI did release their Catalyst 5.13 driver during the last moments of the last year and these gave the Radeon X1000-family of cards support for the acceleration. Now it looks like NVIDIA are going to do the same thing with their Pure Video-eqipped videocards, as they simply release a new driver with included support for hardware acceleration of H.264. Extra interesting is the fact that the GeForce 6150-chipset should support the H.264-format up to a resolution of 720P.
“Nvidia is getting ready to release the miraculous driver that is supposed to beat ATI in Video performances. The driver will ensure that IGP 6150 integrated graphic core and 6200 low end core can play H.264 content at 720P resolution. Faster cards should be able to play 1080 P resolutions without problems.”
ATI who instantly gained a dominating position on the videomarket through Catalyst 5.13 may earn harder competition faster than expected, this delivered by their arch enemy.
Source: The Inq
