Anandtech reviews 21 HDCP compliant video cards including:
Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GS
ASUS GeForce EN7600 GT HDMI
MSI GeForce NX7600 GT
Albatron GeForce 7900 GS
EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GS KO
Leadtek WinFast PX7900GS TDH Extreme
MSI GeForce 7900 GS
MSI GeForce NX7900 GT
EVGA e-GeForce 7950 GT KO
Gigabyte GeForce NX7950 GT
PNY GeForce 7950 GT
XFX GeForce 7950 GT HDCP
Sparkle Calibre 7950 GT
BFG GeForce 7950 GX2
EVGA e-GeForce 7950 GX2
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX (reference)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS (reference)
Powercolor Radeon X1600 PRO HDMI
Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256 (reference)
ATI Radeon X1650XT
The next-generation movie format wars have begun and although we're far away from crowning a winner, both formats do share one thing in common: codecs. Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD support video content encoded in high-bitrate MPEG-2, H.264 or Microsoft's VC1 format, and decoding any of those formats can be extremely taxing on even the fastest modern day CPUs. GPU makers have been hard at work on offloading as much off the decoding pipeline as possible, and although we're still a couple generations away from full GPU offloaded H.264 decoding there is progress being made today.
Performance however is not the only vector we must concern ourselves when looking at what modern day GPUs will do for playback of next-generation high definition content. Content protection and Digital Rights Management (DRM) have been hot button issues of the format wars that are simply not going away and thus proper HDCP support from your OS, graphics card and display is necessary. We know OS support is coming with Windows Vista, display support is here in limited models from various manufacturers, but what about graphics cards?...
[read more]
