"HD DVD" | "Blu-ray Disc": Is Your PC Ready?

[Jerry Jones]

Beware.

Remember back in the time where PCs required a dedicated MPEG-2 card to properly playback DVD videos? We're at a similar juncture with Blu-ray and HD DVD. While most modern PC hardware, including previous generation GPUs and CPUs can playback HDTV without much problem, there is no GPU or CPU alone that can handle decoding of Blu-ray and HD DVD's H.264 streams in full resolution.

Link to HardwareZone.Com article: http://tinyurl.com/2m6wuk

The one thing to remember is that the current generation of video processing hardware featuring AVIVO and PureVideo HD only provide hardware assisted acceleration of H.264 decoding; 'assisted' because they only handle part of the decoding process, which means that you still need to pack a pretty powerful processor in order to achieve smooth H.264 playback on a PC.

Link to another HardwareZone.Com article: http://tinyurl.com/3cy58j

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Hulk]

According to the Anandtech article you linked in another post I'm about 600 or so MHz faster than required to natively decode 1080p.

Were the Anandtech BR X3 tests totally wrong? I think not. I've been frequenting that site in 1999 and have never known them to be anything but accurate.

My processor cost? $220