NVIDIA's PureVideo HD technology attempts to take most of the guess work out of building an HD-DVD and Blu-ray ready system for your home theater or desktop, while offering great playback performance as well. I was more interested in the newer, more compute-intense H.264 codec that more and more movies will be released with in the coming months. This codec offers a higher image quality with similar storage levels but requires more processing to decode quickly enough for smooth playback. In our testing the H.264 bit rates were higher than the VC-1 rates, in the high 18-19 Mbps up to 22 Mbps in some cases. The codec itself is already speced at bit rates up to 960 Mbps (!!) though we obviously don't have the power to decode that quite yet.

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