Hello!
I am seriously thinking about purchasing one of the new dual-core Power Macs... I'm not keen on a rev. A Intel Mac, and my current desktop is getting a little long in the tooth.
Here's my question: as far as I understand, none of the current graphics cards offer hardware acceleration for h.264, right?
Is our current situation like the one a few years back, when computers couldn't play back DVDs smoothly because MPEG2 decoding was all done in the CPU (which subsequently maxed it out)?
If this is the case, should I bother splurging (and waiting a few weeks) on a 7800 GT, or should I just buy a Power Mac with the stock 6600 card and upgrade later when a graphics card is released in that will offload h.264 decoding from the CPU?
I don't really use GPU-intensive apps; my main tools are Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. My XBox is for games.
According to some sites:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20050526100319.html
http://apps.ati.com/ir/PressReleaseText.asp?compid=105421&releaseID=713852
...ATI's next cards will support h.264, while NVIDIA has already released a (Windows) beta 7800 driver that includes h.264 support:
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1116
What do you guys think?
I am seriously thinking about purchasing one of the new dual-core Power Macs... I'm not keen on a rev. A Intel Mac, and my current desktop is getting a little long in the tooth.
Here's my question: as far as I understand, none of the current graphics cards offer hardware acceleration for h.264, right?
Is our current situation like the one a few years back, when computers couldn't play back DVDs smoothly because MPEG2 decoding was all done in the CPU (which subsequently maxed it out)?
If this is the case, should I bother splurging (and waiting a few weeks) on a 7800 GT, or should I just buy a Power Mac with the stock 6600 card and upgrade later when a graphics card is released in that will offload h.264 decoding from the CPU?
I don't really use GPU-intensive apps; my main tools are Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. My XBox is for games.
According to some sites:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20050526100319.html
http://apps.ati.com/ir/PressReleaseText.asp?compid=105421&releaseID=713852
...ATI's next cards will support h.264, while NVIDIA has already released a (Windows) beta 7800 driver that includes h.264 support:
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1116
What do you guys think?