The last couple of months have been dead silent from NVIDIA and its lack of HDCP support was getting painfully obvious. Both ATI and NVIDIA have been criticized for not releasing any graphics cards with support for the encryption technology HDCP which will be used by the new high res movie formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD, but also an important part of Windows Vista. ATI has for long made its partners start working with both HDCP and HDMI-capable graphics cards and even if we have seen a lot of reports about these, we’ve seen very few products so far. Now, from a clear blue sky, NVIDIA comes out with its HDCP support, where the groundworks was laid down yesterday through the launch of PureVideo HD.
To be able to follow this specification for playing Blu-ray and HD DVD on a PC you need a lot, among other things a graphics card sporting HDCP. Which only NVIDIA’s GeForce 7950GX2 supports today. Now it has taken the next step through MSI’s revelation of two HDCP compatible graphics cards at Computex, one being a GeForce 7900GT and the other a GeForce 7600GT. Both cards are equipped with dual DVI outputs and at least one of these will be able to send a HDCP-protected signal through the HDCP chip which has been integrated onto the card. We should be able to expect a broad launch of new cards sporting HDCP during the last quarter of 2006 before Microsoft’s coming launch of Windows Vista and now it seems that NVIDIA is back in the game.
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