VPU

[mb26]

the new nVidia 6800s have a dedicated video prossing unit (VPU) to help with encoding and such, is this sort of thing made separately?
if so how much does it cost, and is there any speed lost by using PCI instead of AGP?.

also, does anyone have any (links to) benchmarks of video encoding speeds with and without the 6800s VPU?

[nocturnx]

The VPU is the main processing unit of the chip. All graphics card have them built in, you do not buy it separate. PCI is much slower than AGP and will bottleneck the cards performance.

[mb26]

ok well in that case i dont mean VPU. i would have called that a GPU?,
what i mean is the dedicated pogramable hardware video encoder thing that the 6800s have?

[Alienware_Dude]

Here's (http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/geforce_6800-16.html) the THG article that explains it. Click on the 'Video Acceleration Tests' to see some benchmark results.

[mb26]

yea thats what i was talking about..
but at that time the drives hadn't been perfected..
'So it looks like we'll have to wait for a launch driver before we see what the video processor can really do... '

anyway is this sort of thing available separately to a graphics card or not?