HDTV

HDTV has been the buzz in the United States for some time now. Higher resolution means that you can watch your favorite athlete make that bone-crunching play and actually get to see the agony on the other guy's face. ATi has had HD support since the X800, and NVIDIA has had it since the 6800. The 7800 continues to offer all of visual improvements and effects from the past - including FSAA, AF, and shader calculations for all resolutions - but it also can render everything faster with the added 80 million transistors of processing power.

The 7800 GTX uses three dedicated video engines to provide "home theatre quality" right from your PC. It has High Definition H.264 support with integrated HDTV output. It also supports HD de-interlacing support (1080i) and inverse 3:2 and 2:2 pull-down. NVIDIA calls this their PureVideo Technology; here are some more features it has to offer:

• High-definition MPEG-2 and WMV9 hardware acceleration
• Spatial-temporal de-interlacing
• 4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling
• Overlay color temperature correction
• Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) - allows for multiple video windows at full video quality and features in each window