I'm looking at building a HTPC using some spare components I have and was wondering if an nVidia 8500GT with 256MB of RAM would be enough to decode Freeview|HD?
Don't quote me but I don't think it would make any diffenece how much memory the card has, it either has the h.264 HW feature or it doesn't, in the case of the 8500GT it does.
IMHO, an 8500gt is the best option. I believe to get the best PQ the decoding needs to be done in hw with the cpu rates in the 4-8% range for tv1/2 and tv3 resp.
You can, of course, use other cards that use the cpu to assist but in my testing the PQ is not as good. This can be subtle and not an issue on smaller displays.
To me it seems that as the level of movement increases (panning or action shots), time runs out to fully process each frame. In the worst case this shows up as juddering but can be a more subtle softening/blurring. I see this most clearly on tv3 weather with the scrolling city/town temperatures at the bottom of the screen. It took an 8500gt and the right codec mix to get sharp text and a smooth scroll on my 47" 3ms 1080p tv.
I also have an 8600gt but can't see any difference in PQ with this.
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