NVIDIA'S NV40 is not going to be just fast in shaders and pixels, it will have some additional features that will be interesting to anybody that messes with Video.
The video capabilities of NV40 are quite something.
It seems that all NV4X generation of cards will feature very attractive video options.
Nvidia wants to promote NV4X generation of chips as the ones with high quality video, complete and ready for HDTV and PVR.
High quality video will brought motion adaptive de-interlacing, high quality scaling and filtering, good old video de-blocking and integrated TV encoder.
As for HDTV, Nvidia claims Transport stream handling, HDTV output (720p, 1080p, 480p CGMS) and HDCP - High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection as well as HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface support.
The PVR part is the most interesting as Nvidia claims that the NV4X generation will have support for no more and no less then MPEG 1/2/4 encode and decode as well as WMV9 decode acceleration.
This means that all decoding and encoding operation previously done by software and very CPU dependant will be able to be processed on NV4X chips. We are not aware specifically how Nvidia plans to do that but it sounds promising.
I'm waiting for Ati to tell more about their R420's (im pretty sure thats the name of the next vid card). But they just want to be so quiet about it...bastards
Nvidia NV40's to Encode/Decode MPEG1/2/4
Linear Mode
