NVidia 8600GTS

[brentonhill]

That sucks! Do you have an idea on a date for that? I heard it was next month?

So If I don't want to wait it sounds like a high end 8600 is my best bet.

[kungpo]

well 1080 is what I'm after, and as I'm halfway there, no point waiting for the R600. Will the 8600 give me good performance in XP, or should I stick with Vista?

[SiM]

IIRC, the hardware acceleration on the 8600s work best in vista.

[kungpo]

I have on .ts (star wars ep 1), which is the one that gives me big problemes. Video is smooth, but audio is really choppy. CPU shoots up to 60% (all the other 1080 material about 30%).

Could this be a Video card problem. Will the extra grunt of the 8600 help, or should I (any suggestions) invest in a better sound card instead?

[aidanjt]

I reckon either will do the job for HD media... But your CPU will be near 100% used when decoding high bitrate 1080p if using a 8800... If you want to do things in the background whilst watching 1080p then its better to go for the 8600gts as your cpu usage would be 30-40% only when watching 1080p...

If your screen is 1920x1080 then you have to go for the 8800 if you want to play any new games, the 8600 can't cope with that resolution for gaming.

Note: no graphics card atm can offload VC1 decoding... the new ati's are meant to be able to do that so it might be worth waiting...

All modern GPUs can decode any video stream, it's just a matter of adding the nessacery codec support to the drivers, or better yet, implement directshow filters that use the GPU.

[aidanjt]

I have on .ts (star wars ep 1), which is the one that gives me big problemes. Video is smooth, but audio is really choppy. CPU shoots up to 60% (all the other 1080 material about 30%).

Could this be a Video card problem. Will the extra grunt of the 8600 help, or should I (any suggestions) invest in a better sound card instead?

A 8600 would likely yield better performance gains for HD video. Audio is only a fraction of the processing overhead.

[SiM]

It could be a problem with the source file...

[aidanjt]

That's also a distinct possibility.

[SiM]

All modern GPUs can decode any video stream, it's just a matter of adding the nessacery codec support to the drivers, or better yet, implement directshow filters that use the GPU.

The actual hardware in these new cards is different, not the codec support...

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2970&p=3
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...&#post10357876

[kungpo]

Yep - I think the source file is the issue all right. Everything else plays back perfectly.