Not so Ultra: No Decode Acceleration on NV40 and NV45

As we mentioned before, PureVideo is only partially functional on NV40 and NV45 (GeForce 6800 Ultra and 6800GT, AGP and PCIe), all of the de-interlacing and image quality functionality is there, however those GPUs do not have any WMV9 decode acceleration which is made evident by the performance comparison below:

NV40/45 vs. NV43 - WMV9 HW Accelerated CPU Utilization (Lower is Better) - VMR9 Window
  Minimum Average Maximum
NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT 7.7 16.6 24.2
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT 18 31.6 43


NV40/45 vs. NV43 - WMV9 HW Accelerated CPU Utilization (Lower is Better) - VMR9 Full
  Minimum Average Maximum
NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT 5.5 17.3 24.2
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT 18.8 34.2 49.2


Remember that this only applies to the NV40 (GeForce 6800GT/Ultra AGP) and NV45 (GeForce 6800GT/Ultra PCIe), NV41 (GeForce 6800) has fully function WMV9 decode acceleration.

A Preview of the Future - Fully Hardware Accelerated HD Decode Final Words
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  • phusg - Tuesday, March 1, 2005 - link

    Has anyone found a 6600GT card manufacturer that bundles nvDVD including the DVD decoder yet?
  • akozak - Tuesday, January 4, 2005 - link

    Hey Anand,

    Don't mean to poo-poo on your hardwork - but almost all of your images are using different frames.

    a) Galaxy Quest - differences in star placements, planet alignment

    b) Apollo 13 - head is shifted b/w images

    c) Friends - characters shift - legs are different locations etc

    In fact the only ones that look like they are the same frame show no differences.

    Have you looked at the difference in frames? If you took one frame before or one frame after on one card, would it match up to the other card's image you already have?



  • b3roldan - Friday, December 31, 2004 - link

    hi, I'm using a vanilla 6800 from inno3d w/ Forceware 66.93.

    I was just wonderin if you guys were also experiencing problems I've had with these games or if t'was just me.

    Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance
    - Everything's black and white. Wondering if it has anything to do with nvidia's 0x32 Z stencil (shadowing technology).

    MAFIA
    - Walls are multi-colored, sometimes transparent

    I've just upgraded from a 9800PRO 128mb, which worked pretty well with these games.

    Just wonderin if there are others with the same prob... thx :)
  • Gatak - Thursday, December 23, 2004 - link

    What nvidia or ATi ought to do is to prove a simplier interface and especially much better documentation on how to access the hardware directly.

    The GPU's are incredibly fast for lots of things. For example it would indeed be possible to do video encoding, photo manipulation effects (Apple core.image/video!) or even sound compression.
  • jago25 - Thursday, December 23, 2004 - link

    Shame I'll never be able to use it..seeing as I don't use Windows.

    You can use a GPU to do anything. Might be a good idea to make it easier to do so rather than having to develop more codecs as that's a never ending job.
  • hellokeith - Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - link

    The article really needs to be corrected per the 6800 PCI Express vs 6800 AGP. People are talking about this on numerous HTPC/AVS forums and being mislead. Only the PCI Express 6800 has the new silicon.
  • karlreading - Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - link

    ive jumped through the other pages from a comment on page one, so if this has already been answered, lynch me now:
    anand said he knows of no manufacturer that bundles nv DVD.
    im pretty sure its on my bfg disc that came with me 6800GT OC ;)
    thats me sorted then.
    karlos
  • mikepers - Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - link

    This should help:

    http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_purevideo_requir...

    There's a link for the correct driver and the decoder and at the bottom a link which shows which cards support what. Sort of sucks that my AGP 6800 Ultra has less features then a 6600 card but it is what it is...
  • CrystalBay - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link

    Remember Buy.com ? Where are you Harvey!!!!
  • tfranzese - Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - link

    mcveigh, he provided the link to where you could find that for the ATi side of things. I'm curious about the S3 things, though it wouldn't surprise me if true.

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