Video Card Roundup - DVD Quality, Features & Performance - October 2000

NVIDIA gets in on the action

With ATI and S3 both attempting to raise the bar in hardware assisted DVD performance on the PC, it was about time for NVIDIA to jump on the bandwagon as well.  Finally, around 7 months after the release of the Rage 128, and over a year after the release of S3’s Savage3D, the “king” of the graphics card industry finally came out with their own hardware motion compensation engine. 

NVIDIA’s GeForce 256 featured the company’s first HWMC engine and in spite of its late entrance into the market while both ATI and S3 had the feature for quite some time, it was actually a very well placed introduction.  If you recall, the GeForce 256 was the first card from NVIDIA to boast their ‘GPU’ or hardware T&L unit, designed to improve performance on slower systems as well as offload the transformation and lighting stages of the rendering process from the CPU onto the GPU.  Going along with this idea of taking some of the load off of the host CPU, the GeForce 256’s HWMC support does the same exact thing, only with reference to DVD decoding instead of 3D rendering. 

The HWMC engine we saw debut with the GeForce 256 has been with NVIDIA since then, and is also present on the GeForce2 MX as well as the GeForce2 GTS. 

Matrox, where are you?

Amidst all of this criticism towards NVIDIA for being slow to adopt a HWMC engine, Matrox, a strong promoter of DVD playback on your PC, continued to show no support for any sort of motion compensation or iDCT in hardware.  Their reasons were simple, CPUs were getting fast enough that such hardware support wasn’t necessary, and thus the Millennium G200, G400 and G450 did not feature any sort of HWMC. 

Matrox can claim that they have support for videoport overlay and Colorspace Conversion (CSC) in hardware, but so do all other manufacturers so there’s not much point in touting those features.