The last six months there have been many discussions about the computer market and the encryption technology HDCP. The technology is a requirement for those who wants to play HD DVD and Blu-ray movies on their computer with a digital video connection and the highest possible image quality. To play these formats, and most likely any other copyprotected material which is released in the future, you have to have support throughout the entire video signal link, from the input to the output. Both monitor and graphics card have to support HDCP to be able to play high-res movie formats. We’ve lately seen a significant increase of graphics cards with support for HDCP and at Anandtech they’ve dug deeper and compared 20 different cores with support for the technology.
They look at important bits such as 3D performance, 2D hardware acceleration, heat and noise. An interesting comparison which gives you a hint of what you can expect from the HDCP-capable cards of today when it comes to taking load of the processor and such when playing Blu-ray and HD DVD movies.
“Since these video cards are all HDCP compatible, we also want to test how they handle video playback. CPU utilization while playing content from Blu-Ray discs (BD) is something we will be looking at in this review, and we’ll be looking at the type of power consumption we see with these cards during BD playback as well.”
