PureVideo HD

The GeForce 8 series card already implements an incarnation of PureVideo HD. This is extended now with the the G84 and G86 GPUs. Tasks which were previously handled by the CPU are now completely done by the GPU itself. This reduces the overall load on the CPU. The GeForce 7 series did handle part of these computations, leaving the rest to the CPU. On the GeForce 8800 more operations could be offloaded to the GPU, but the G84 and G86 chips have even more features. This means that for HD video decoding the new cards are actually better than the 8800 Series.


The above graph shows you what difference the new implementation of PureVideo HD has on CPU load. While the difference between CPU only and 7600 GT were rather large, they are even greater when compared to the 8600 GTS. In all fairness, it should be noted, that the 7600 GT is actually replaced by the 8600 GT not the 8600 GTS.