NVIDIA is now only a few weeks away from its last and final step towards full support for the next generation optical movie formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD. When NVIDIA a month ago announcsed its PureVideo HD specification there was one thing that felt anything but clear; the graphics card has to sport HDCP to be able to fulfill the requirements. The only cards at the time doing so was NVIDIA’s super-fresh high-end card GeForce 7950GX2. Now new information says that NVIDIA will, within 6 weeks, launch upgraded versions of GeForce 7900GT and 7900GTX with HDCP support.
Together with the previous information about the budget circuits G73-B1 and G72, which also sports HDCP through their HDMI outputs, NVIDIA has a really broad HDCP setup coming. That NVIDIA’s launch comes now is hardly surprising considering that both Blu-ray and HD DVD players are expected to arrive for PCs within a few months. We have for long been talking about HDCP-capable graphics cards from ATI, but now it seems that NVIDIA will out of nowhere bringing the perhaps most efficient solution. NVIDIA’s circuits namely has the HDCP functinality integrated into the graphics circuit, while ATI require external ships to be used for handling the HDCP signals.
