High Definition playback. Do I need to upgrade?

[Hempage]

So, I recently bought a new AMD X2 3800+ system, and I have to say, the extra processing power is nice, and easily did what I needed ... until I decided to start playing with HD video. I downloaded a couple of episodes from http://mariposahd.tv to see how good HD quality was, and was shocked to find I couldn't play them on my brand new system! They just would skip too much. So I tried them on my school laptop, and they played just fine. Since I have almost the exact same speed of processors on my laptop and my desktop (my school laptop has a 2.0 ghz Intel Centrino Duo), I thought it might be my video card. My desktop has an NVIDIA 5200 FX with 128 MB ram, and my laptop has an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 110M, which I think has 512 MB ram. I know my desktop has an absurdly weak video card, but I want to know if upgrading it will fix my HD video problem. It seems to be able to play the videos just fine, if I set my video player to just decode but not display the video.

Sorry for the rather long post. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[FAT_ALBERT]

Yeah, upgrade, I would say a 7600 GT or a X1600 at least herse some linkies

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814127217
I like this because of nVidia's Purevideo, thats takes 40% of load of of the CPU, and its HDCP ready so it can play every type of HD video.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102032
Its got HDMI

I'd go with the 7600GT AT LEAST. Look on the cards box for a thing that says HDCP, if it has that then you should be able to run HD vids, nVidia is better.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

I like this because of nVidia's Purevideo, thats takes 40% of load of of the CPU, and its HDCP ready so it can play every type of HD video.

ATi's AVIVO also take the load of of video processing, and arguably that would be the ONLY area where the X1600 would equal or better the GF7600GT which is unquestionably better gaming solution. nVidia has added PureVideoHD to even the playing field of video playback. It'll be interesting to see if then can make CPU utilization as low as the ATi cards. The preview from Anand shows alot of promise, but still as they say only relieved 20% of the CPU load on titles using H.264 which is even harder on the CPU;
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2798

It'll be interesting to see their head to head comparison.

I'd go with the 7600GT AT LEAST. Look on the cards box for a thing that says HDCP, if it has that then you should be able to run HD vids,

Actually HDCP is not related to HD video acceleration, it's related to copy-protected material, which is not what he's viewing. And it's not necessary to have either HDCP or HD video acceleration, but the later helps in situations like this where the CPU might not be able to do it on it's own.