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Dude .. what is HDCP?

A HD Ready television or monitor will have either a DVI (Digital Video Interface) or HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface). Both connections provide exceptional quality, HDMI is often referred to as the digital SCART cable as it also provides audio. DVI supplies picture only, separate cables are needed for audio. Both HDMI and DVI support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) which will be a requirement for protected content.

With Vista when you want to playback HDCP content (movies) on your monitor, the resolution could be scaled down or even worse. It's like this: your screen will go black during playback, if you do not have a HDCP encoder chip working on the graphics card.

So if you plan to buy a 8500 GT or 8600 GT that will function in a Home Theater PC and at one point you'd like to have BluRay, HD-DVD or HDCP-protected content playback on that system, the 8500 and 8600 GT will be a no go. I however do believe that some of the board partners will include a custom Crypto chip to make this happen. But this will vary among the board partners.

PureVideo HD - the 2nd generation

The HDCP discussion brings me towards PureVideo. The new 8600 and 8500 products will have a newly revised video engine to decode all that Bluray and HD-DVD madness.

The video engine provides HD video playback up to resolutions of 1080p. G84 and G86 support hardware accelerated decoding of H.264 video as well. The cards also feature advanced post-processing video algorithms. Supported algorithms include spatial-temporal de-interlacing, inverse 2:2, 3:2 pull-down and 4-tap horizontal and 5-tap vertical video scaling.

PureVideo HD is is a video engine built into the GPU (this is dedicated core logic) and thus is dedicated GPU-based video processing hardware, software drivers and software-based players that accelerate decoding and enhance image quality of high definition video in the following formats: H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 HD.

In my opinion two key factors are a big advantage. First off to allow offloading the CPU by allowing the GPU to take over a huge sum of the workload. HDTV decoding through a TS (Transport Stream) file, for example, can be very demanding for a CPU. These media files can peak to 20 Mbit/sec easily as HDTV streams offer high-resolution playback in 1280x720p or even 1920x1080p without framedrops and image quality loss. Secondly image quality enhancements like deblocking.

The engine got revised. The previous engine was already rather good. It did get a little better though as the new engine offloads another chunk of what the CPU normally does namely it now handles Bitstream processing (format of the data found in some stream of bits used in a digital communication or storage application) and a function called inverse transform as well.

With the new PureVideo engine the popular benchmark tool HQV now will score 128 points, which is near perfect. Software like WinDVD, PowerDVD and Nero showtime will support PureVideo from within their software. You can also buy the PureVideo software for a few tenners at NVIDIA after which MediaPlayer or Media Center will work with it flawlessly. 

To give you an idea how intensely big one frame of 1920x1080 is with a framerate of 24 frames per second. Click on a the two example images above. Load them up, and realize that your graphics card is displaying that kind of content 24 times per second, while enhancing them in real-time.

Okay enough tech chatter, let's have a look at what the board partners are bundling in their boxes. To be fair we'll do them in alphabetical order.

BFG Technology

BFG submitted a GeForce 8600 GTS for this review. They'll release several versions, although the "standard" cards sell the best. Obviously everyone today will send in their pre-overclocked version. Hey, everybody wants to be on top of the charts right?

We received the BFG GeForce 8600 GTS OC and it comes packed with 256MB memory. Now the "normal" version will have a clock/memory frequency of 675/1000 MHz. This OC edition is pre-overclocked slightly to 710/1008. It's an incrediblely small overclock really, but BFG wants to prevent RMA procedures obviously and I can't say I blame them for it as their warranty policy is just golden. You'll receive a life-time warranty on this GPU, which is awesome. In Europe however there is something called the EU legislation. You can expect 10 years warranty in Europe, which is fantastic.

The 8600 GTS OC comes with:

• GeForce 8600 GTS 256 MB
• Driver CD
• HDTV block (3-way RCA component)
• 6-pin to Molex power cable
• manual
• VGA->DVI dongle x2

Agreed, their bundle usually is a little more average, in this case no free game is included, but usually they have a slightly better price. We'll have a closer look in our photo-shoot at all tested products.

We got BFG in da house with their GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB OC edition