It's finally time to build a new PC...three of them!

[mroz]

Firstly the old card doesn't do DX10, which means it won't give you the eye-candy in Vista. More importantly it has the old "video" engine. The new one does all H264 processing in hardware, for instance. Hang on I'll find a page that details it: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/486/2/

Thanks. Interesting.

DX10 I wasn't bothered about, but then I had thought most Vista eye candy can be had with a decent DX9 card. I'm wrong? It doesn't affect me now, however this box probably will have Vista on it in a year or two.

The H264 decoding is more interesting. Do you know which codecs are likely to make use of it? I never liked having to use NVidia's own stuff. Quality often seemed to suffer where they cut corners for speed, post processing never was on a par with ffdshow & software peformance wise it was never high, unlike Core's codec. It'd be a shame if only their codecs made full use of this hardware.

Still, I'm not too worried to have missed out on this. I can see the benefit with a low/mid range box, but an overclocked (touch wood) Q6600 shouldn't need it. Also I'm not likely to be bothering with 1080p x264 encodes for a good while as I don't have much to display them on or many sources demanding such quality; most of my displays including the big ones only go to 720p.

Thank again for the info

Don't suppose you know if this engine can benefit encoding significantly? That would persuade me to change over, as encoding is so very demanding for any hardware. I should probably check this out on the x265 devel list.

Edit: btw, sorry Parm, didn't mean to hijack your thread.

[Thorsson]

Have a look at this. Don't forget the 7900 is quite a bit more powerful than the 7600. OTOH, as you say, with a Quad Core, perhaps it doesn't matter to most people.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...rce_8600_gt/14

[mroz]

Have a look at this. Don't forget the 7900 is quite a bit more powerful than the 7600. OTOH, as you say, with a Quad Core, perhaps it doesn't matter to most people.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...rce_8600_gt/14

To summarise overly, the newer cards dropped cpu load for decoding HD h264 from around 60% to around 20%. They were testing with an E6300 & using PowerDVD with hardware acceleration.

Thanks for the data. The improvement with the newer gfx hardware acceleration doesn't surprise me, but the level of high cpu usage in other cases does somewhat given the cpu was a not too shabby E6300. So I concede your direction to go with a newer card is advisable.

If most decoders were able to exploit four cores (CoreAVC will afaik, but not m/any others), having a Q6600 would make it much less important, but still, even then it's always good to offload work from the cpu.

Oh well, at least I can upgrade my gfx card on my next build & transfer this one to an older box. I'm not gutted, but if I'd read this before buying I would have gone with a passive 8600.