Any hope for drivers for old cards

Hello,
is there any hope that NVIDIA will release drivers for old cards, such as
my NIVIDA AGP GeForce 6600 GT, drivers that can allow these old cards(even
if they don't have PureVideo) to use their GPU power to help the CPU for
high definition h264 mpeg4 avc videos ?
That would be great :-)

Filou wrote:
Hello,
is there any hope that NVIDIA will release drivers for old cards, such as
my NIVIDA AGP GeForce 6600 GT, drivers that can allow these old cards(even
if they don't have PureVideo) to use their GPU power to help the CPU for
high definition h264 mpeg4 avc videos ?
That would be great :-)

That's not the way it works. The only reason GF8, 9, and GT series have
hardware accelerated decoding (either post processing or codec
transformations) is due to specific hardware support on the die in the
form of programmable shader units.

The GPU can be used as a "GPGPU" that uses unified shaders to process
code in parallel. In newer cards, NVIDIA uses CUDA language support to
run arbitrary highly parallelized code on the GPU. In this case, VC-2
and H264 decoding can be utilized through DirectX DXVA support.

Even if you have an older card like a GF6, you can still do hardware
accelerated post processing of the video overlay. Colorspace
conversions and some filtering can be offloaded.

Unfortunately you'll never be able to do this:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/accele...the-gpu-guide/

I had an XFX 6600GT before and the best it can do is hardware
accelerated MPEG-2 through PureVideo and accelerated DXVA overlay in
Media Player.

http://www.nvidia.com/docs/CP/11036/...Comparison.pdf
According to the PDF, the 6600GT has PureVideo H.264 decode capability. So
it's just a matter of using recent drivers (latest is 181.22 for XP,
supports 6600GT).

nVidia doesn't produce the playback software, though. Instead it had
licensed the PureVideo API to Cyberlink and Intervideo. The premium versions
of PowerDVD or WinDVD have built-in support for PureVideo acceleration and
will use your 6600GT GPU for H.264 decoding assist.

You may, however, find PureVideo-assisted H.264 playback through those
bloated commercial apps to be no better than an optimized software decoder
like CoreAVC, which can be downloaded free from many places.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."


"Filou" wrote in message
. 37...
Hello,
is there any hope that NVIDIA will release drivers for old cards, such as
my NIVIDA AGP GeForce 6600 GT, drivers that can allow these old cards(even
if they don't have PureVideo) to use their GPU power to help the CPU for
high definition h264 mpeg4 avc videos ?
That would be great :-)