Many of you may know or not know the new standard for high definition video with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray technology.
Fact 1: NO ONE can view this stuff with your current video card no matter how new it is.
As part of the Windows-Vista Ready Monitor article, I was going to publish a list of all of the graphics cards that currently support HDCP. I mean, I remember GPUs dating as far back as the Radeon 8500 that had boasted of HDCP support.
Turns out, we were all deceived.
After some investigation, Brandon and I determined that there is no shipping retail add-in board with HDCP decoding keys. Simply put, none of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today support HDCP.
Fact 2: Non compliant equipment (monitors and video cards) will only show 25% of the picture. Pixel density and resolution will significantly drop to somewhere along the lines of 640x480 as opposed to 1980x1080, etc…
It’s a good read for sure…
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/default.asp