HDCP Compatible Graphics Cards Roundup

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To briefly recap our performance tests, we found that the new 8800 GTX provided the highest level of performance out of all of these cards. This was followed by the BFG and EVGA GeForce 7950 GX2s, along with the 8800 GTS and Sapphire's Radeon X1950 XTX. The GX2 cards placed slightly higher in Battlefield 2 while the 8800 GTS and X1950 XTX scored higher in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, with the GTS taking the overall second place crown. The next best performers were the Sparkle Calibre 7950 GT and the rest of the 7950 GTs. The Leadtek WinFast PX7900 GS TDH Extreme led in performance for the 7900 GS cards, then the EVGA 7900 GS KO, and lastly the Albatron 7900 GS. The next best performer was the MSI NX7600 GT which led in performance against the HDMI 7600 GT cards. The Gigabyte 7600 GS was the lowest performing NVIDIA card, and the ATI Powercolor X1600 PRO was the lowest performer of them all.

Looking at CPU utilization during Blu-ray playback, we saw that ATI cards generally did a little better than NVIDIA ones, and the 8800 GTX and GTS did particularly well compared to other NVIDIA cards. It is important to note that the only tests we could run today are with MPEG-2 decode tests. Unfortunately, this says nothing about the relative performance of heavy duty encoding formats like H.264 and even VC-1 (which will be used more frequently for future BD and HD-DVD content). The only thing we can say at this point is that lower CPU utilization is better. Just how much better in the long run won't be clear until we can test higher bitrate content in other formats.

[...]Because HDCP and accompanying technologies are so new, we encountered problems or quirks with a few of these cards. Some of the cards, like the HDMI Gigabyte 7600 GS and ASUS EN7600 GT, were only able to play our Blu-ray movies over HDMI and not through the DVI port. Conversely, we found that with our MSI NX7600 GT Diamond Plus, the Blu-ray content wouldn't play through the HDMI connection but it would through the DVI port. These issues can generally be solved by converters, but it's still a bit of a nuisance. Unfortunately, an HDCP key ROM is required for each display output in order to allow protected content to play over both. Oversights like this should be remedied in the future (at the expense of either the manufacturer or the end user). For now, consumers should be aware of the situation.