Will Nvidia's new GPU features be useful to the Xvid project?

[saratoga]

We don't have anything to test this thing with right now, but there is a whole lot this thing can do, including inverse 3:2 pulldown (conversion from interlaced TV format to progressive format better suited to computer monitors), colorspace conversion, gamma correction, MPEG 2 MPEG 4 WMV9 DiVX decoding and encoding, scaling, frame rate conversion, and anything else you'd like it to do for you.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=2023&p=7

Theres also an Nvidia slide show around showing some more info about what specifically they intend to accelerate, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.

I'm wondering if this will be useful for Xvid encoding/decodeing or if it will be limited to Nvidia's software.

Also, sorry if this is a repost, I didn't see anything on this topic so I'm assuming it hasn't been discussed recently.

[saratoga]

Ah found the slide i was thinking of:

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~mikeg/stuff.jpg

[MfA]

Well sure, if it is user programmable ... Im guessing the SDK will have a NDA though, unfortunately (most of that stuff is not easily achieved with shaders, I assume they will have a programming environment which uses the same resources as shaders but at a lower more flexible level).

[Neo Neko]

First of all don't expect it to be great quality. Consumer grade products are always lacking. IIRC there was already a discussion on the topic here. Though not on the specific card. Hardware encoders on video cards are nothing new. I have had video cards with hardware MPEG and MPEG2 codec units for almost 6~7 years. I basically never use them because the quality has been and almost always will be crap. First and formost these are 3d accelerator and display driver cards. If you want good quality get a card dedicated to the purpose.

There is a difference between this card and past ones though. There is more support for 3rd party codecs. In the past it was only the companies own proprietary codecs. This goes for both ATI and Nvidia. Though both have announced and are showing cards supporting 3rd party codecs. I still don't see any real benefit outside of being able to decode decent rez WM content without having a cray. Most of the algorythms built in to these chips are the simpler less accurate algorythms that would not drive up production costs to implement. I might be willing to sacrifice some decoding quality. But not encoding quality. We will have to wait a month and see just how good it is. But don't get your hopes up.