![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
Want to know a secret?
None of the current ATI or NVIDIA graphics cards will support the full capabilities of Windows Vista.
But lets start from the beginning. This story starts with an upcoming LCD Monitor Review. As you know, a good monitor should last several years and outlive every other component in your PC, other than perhaps a keyboard or a mouse. So, when it came time to do another review of LCD monitors, my attention turned towards Windows Vista-ready monitors: those with HDCP. After all, it makes no sense to recommend a monitor that will go obsolete in just a few months.
At the time I started this article, there were only 10 PC monitors with DVI/HDCP support. I was disappointed, but what was surprising is that many of these monitor manufacturers werent advertising their HDCP support. For monitors, HDCP support is the most important feature for having a future proof solution.
What is HDCP?
HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and is an Intel-initiated program that was developed with Silicon Image. This content protection system is mandatory for high-definition playback of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. If you want to watch movies at 1980x1080, your system will need to support HDCP. If you dont have HDCP support, youll only get a quarter of the resolution. A 75% loss in pixel density is a pretty big deal Wouldnt you be angry if your car was advertised as doing 16 mpg, and you only got 4 mpg? Or if you bought a 2 GHz CPU and found out that it only ran at 500 MHz?
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.
Although ATI has had HDCP support in their GPUs since the Radeon 8500, and NVIDIA has had HDCP support in their GPUs since the GeForce FX5700, it turns out that things are more complicated -- just because the GPU itself supports HDCP doesnt mean that the graphics card can output a DVI/HDCP compliant stream. There needs to be additional support at the board level, which includes licensing the HDCP decoding keys from the Digital Content Protection, LLC (a spin-off corporation within the walls of Intel).
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.
I did not believe this at first. Surely, I was misinterpreting the content of the emails I was receiving. After all, everyone is hyping up H.264 support and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray playback. When I go to http://www.ati.com/products/RadeonX1900/specs.html I see HDCP support listed. Am I supposed to know that the board doesnt support it because I can go to http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx1900/radeonx1900xtx/specs.html and see that HDCP is omitted? If thats the case, am I supposed to know that the board has 48 shader processors when its only listed in the GPU specifications page?
What weve confirmed
Weve been able to confirm that none of the Built-by-ATI Radeons support HDCP. If youve just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080 resolution in the future, youve just wasted your money.
NVIDIA, being a GPU manufacturer was unable to discuss the plans of board manufacturers. We contacted all six of NVIDIAs Tier-1 board partners. None of the GeForce 6 or 7 video cards available on the market, including the most recently released GeForce 7800GS, have HDCP support. So if you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, youve just wasted your money.
How can these companies be so oblivious? Playing Devils Advocate, I thought to myself that maybe, just maybe, by the time Windows Vista comes out, most people are going to upgrade their GPU. If the HDCP support was very expensive, then paying for the HDCP license now would be like paying for something you dont use. So I dug around for HDCP licensing costs. Turns out, that the answer is available at the HDMI website. HDCP licensing requires a $15,000 annual fee and a per-device fee of $0.005, i.e. a fraction of a cent. Thats not too expensive. There goes that argument.
Things Get Worse!
Video cards are the only components in a PC that have gone up in price over time. Yet manufacturers are trying to sell video cards that dont support HDCP? The technology has been around for years. Microsoft made it public in March 2005 that HDCP would be required for Windows Vista and reiterated it again in April 2005 certainly the video card manufacturers were given this info before the public were. Moreover, what about companies who are already paying the $15,000 annual company fee because they produce HDCP-compliant products for televisions?
Despite my discovery that HDCP licensing is fairly cheap, Im still trying to find an answer. There must be a silver lining somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, existing cards can be retrofitted for HDCP support. Maybe its simply a matter of a BIOS flash where each board gets its own serial number. If that were true, the worse case scenario would be that customers would pay a few bucks for the HDCP license.
Turns out that this was also wishful thinking.
An ATI representative said: People will not be able to turn on HDCP through a software patch since the HDCP keys need to be present during the manufacturing. We are rolling out HDCP through OEMs at this time but we have not finalized our retail plans yet.
As I pressed for more information about potential retail plans (i.e. trade-in programs, whether existing boards already have traces for the HDCP hardware where it can be plugged in), I got only a vague response:
We cannot get into more detail at this time, as any further discussion would get into our trade secrets. However, we do promise to give you a full update on our retail plans once they are finalized.
Im not going to speculate on whether ATIs reticence is because theyre trying to downplay a big fiasco, or if theyre trying to keep their super generous solution secret to throw off the competition. Theres actually no way to know.
Well, what about NVIDIA? They were actually very direct: The boards themselves must be designed with an extra chip when the board is manufactured. The extra chip stores a crypto key, and you cannot retrofit an existing board after the board is produced.
Wow. You can pick your favorite expletive.
Who Do We Blame?
Blame Canada?
As ATI is a GPU and board manufacturer, Im disappointed that Built-by-ATI video cards lack HDCP support. Think about it. The GPU engineers are smart enough to know that their GPUs need to support HDCP, but their board engineers arent? Is it even possible to build a GPU without thinking about the board that has to go along with it? ATI is extremely reticent to give us any more details about Retail Plans. Maybe ATI owners will get lucky, and ATI will have some sort of free upgrade program. Maybe ATI owners will get shafted, and buyers of X1900XTs are going to find themselves with a video card that cannot play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray at 1920x1080. Who knows?
Blame Santa Clara?
What about NVIDIA? Personally, I think they have the least blood on their hand for two reasons. One, they arent a board manufacturer. That excuse alone wouldnt be good enough for me though.
What really gets them off the hook is that NVIDIA has been offering their board manufacturing partners designs with HDCP support since May 2005. Likewise, NVIDIA has actually shipped HDCP-enabled GeForce 6200 and 6600s in Sony Media Center PCs. Those boards just arent manufactured at retail. In retrospect, they did their part. It was the board manufacturers who failed us. I dont need to name names, because they ALL failed us.
Blame the other Santa Clara company?
HDCP is the brain-child of Intel, and now belongs to a spin-off company, Digital Content Protection, LLC. Theyre the ones who profit off all of the licensing fees. If HDCP licensing were cheaper, might we have seen more PC products with HDCP support? Possibly. It still seems to me that HDCP has relatively benign pricing when it comes to licensing. It's half a cent per item. If you compare that to licensing fees for HDMI, you'll see that while both have the same $15,000 annual fee, HDMI licensing is 4 cents/per unit (if you use the maximum discount as an example). Should we blame Intel for creating HDCP in the first place? I dont think so. HDCP was a technology made in response to Hollywoods requests. Blue laser technology can only go so far without content.
Blame Hollywood?
HDCP is an artificial requirement theres no reason why HD-DVD or Blu-Ray needs content protection. Although the movie industry is among the wealthiest of all industries, Hollywood has made things tougher in their paranoia of software piracy. Can we blame Hollywood for demanding HDCP? Maybe a little bit, but theyre not responsible for this current fiasco. Movie studios have done their fair part to make high-definition home video a possibility. From the get go, Hollywood made it clear that content protection was going to be necessary for high-definition video and they gave the electronics industry ample warning. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are coming in 2006. Television manufacturers have been putting HDCP into HDTVs from as far back as 2002. While Hollywood is certainly responsible for pressuring Microsoft into requiring HDCP for Windows Vista, they set their ground rules early on.
Is it our fault?
Think about it. If consumers and reviewers didnt use the terms GPU and graphics card interchangeably, this wouldnt be a problem. When it was disclosed that Microsoft required HDCP for high-definition HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback in Windows Vista, everyone turned their attention to monitors, assuming that GPUs would support it. We all know the what happens when you assume. Likewise, why didnt reviewers investigate if features in a GPU actually made it to the board level? Most importantly, we as consumers never clamored for HDCP support.
So in a way, even consumers are at fault, right? No way. Only the truly twisted would claim that the victims brought it upon themselves. Do any of us ask for Direct3D or OpenGL support? Its a given. Consumers never demanded HDCP support because it was already thought to be there.
Final thoughts
This is a tough situation. The PC world simply isnt ready for high-definition video playback via HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. There failures occurred at so many different levels. Ive probably burned a few bridges in this article, and I probably wont be reviewing any video cards in the near future. Nonetheless, this was a train that had already left the station. Keeping quiet about the problem wouldnt have stopped the customer outrage when Windows Vista was released. The solution to this problem isnt technical. Its political. I hope that board manufacturers will own up to the challenge and explain their actions to their customers. There's still time to come up with a solution.
Without a doubt, this is huge, startling news. As much as ATI and NVIDIA have been promoting H.264 decoding with their latest GPUs, its pretty shocking to see that apparently none of the shipping retail cards on the market have been built to take advantage of it. To add insult to injury, it appears that a line of Sony GeForce 6200s and 6600s offer HDCP support, yet the latest high-end GeForce 7800 GTX cards dont. Hows that for irony?
While some of you may not plan on upgrading to Vista at the end of this year, this is eventually going to affect you if you ever planned on watching hi-def movies on your PC in the future. Microsoft will eventually end support for Windows XP; already, their Games Division is planning Vista-exclusive titles such as Halo 2. It will only be a matter of time before other software developers follow suit, forcing anyone whos remotely interested in gaming to upgrade to Windows Vista.
Anyone with a GeForce 6/7 or Radeon X1K card who was planning on buying a BD-ROM or HD-DVD drive later this year for their PC may want to hold off on that purchase. Quite frankly, this article should affect the purchasing decisions of potentially anyone in the market for a new PC or graphics card right now thats even remotely interested in watching hi-def movies on their PC sometime in the future.
this comes from
http://www.fraggednation.com/forum.php?action=showPosts&topicID=4915
None of the current ATI or NVIDIA graphics cards will support the full capabilities of Windows Vista.
But lets start from the beginning. This story starts with an upcoming LCD Monitor Review. As you know, a good monitor should last several years and outlive every other component in your PC, other than perhaps a keyboard or a mouse. So, when it came time to do another review of LCD monitors, my attention turned towards Windows Vista-ready monitors: those with HDCP. After all, it makes no sense to recommend a monitor that will go obsolete in just a few months.
At the time I started this article, there were only 10 PC monitors with DVI/HDCP support. I was disappointed, but what was surprising is that many of these monitor manufacturers werent advertising their HDCP support. For monitors, HDCP support is the most important feature for having a future proof solution.
What is HDCP?
HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and is an Intel-initiated program that was developed with Silicon Image. This content protection system is mandatory for high-definition playback of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. If you want to watch movies at 1980x1080, your system will need to support HDCP. If you dont have HDCP support, youll only get a quarter of the resolution. A 75% loss in pixel density is a pretty big deal Wouldnt you be angry if your car was advertised as doing 16 mpg, and you only got 4 mpg? Or if you bought a 2 GHz CPU and found out that it only ran at 500 MHz?
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.
Although ATI has had HDCP support in their GPUs since the Radeon 8500, and NVIDIA has had HDCP support in their GPUs since the GeForce FX5700, it turns out that things are more complicated -- just because the GPU itself supports HDCP doesnt mean that the graphics card can output a DVI/HDCP compliant stream. There needs to be additional support at the board level, which includes licensing the HDCP decoding keys from the Digital Content Protection, LLC (a spin-off corporation within the walls of Intel).
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.
I did not believe this at first. Surely, I was misinterpreting the content of the emails I was receiving. After all, everyone is hyping up H.264 support and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray playback. When I go to http://www.ati.com/products/RadeonX1900/specs.html I see HDCP support listed. Am I supposed to know that the board doesnt support it because I can go to http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx1900/radeonx1900xtx/specs.html and see that HDCP is omitted? If thats the case, am I supposed to know that the board has 48 shader processors when its only listed in the GPU specifications page?
What weve confirmed
Weve been able to confirm that none of the Built-by-ATI Radeons support HDCP. If youve just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080 resolution in the future, youve just wasted your money.
NVIDIA, being a GPU manufacturer was unable to discuss the plans of board manufacturers. We contacted all six of NVIDIAs Tier-1 board partners. None of the GeForce 6 or 7 video cards available on the market, including the most recently released GeForce 7800GS, have HDCP support. So if you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, youve just wasted your money.
How can these companies be so oblivious? Playing Devils Advocate, I thought to myself that maybe, just maybe, by the time Windows Vista comes out, most people are going to upgrade their GPU. If the HDCP support was very expensive, then paying for the HDCP license now would be like paying for something you dont use. So I dug around for HDCP licensing costs. Turns out, that the answer is available at the HDMI website. HDCP licensing requires a $15,000 annual fee and a per-device fee of $0.005, i.e. a fraction of a cent. Thats not too expensive. There goes that argument.
Things Get Worse!
Video cards are the only components in a PC that have gone up in price over time. Yet manufacturers are trying to sell video cards that dont support HDCP? The technology has been around for years. Microsoft made it public in March 2005 that HDCP would be required for Windows Vista and reiterated it again in April 2005 certainly the video card manufacturers were given this info before the public were. Moreover, what about companies who are already paying the $15,000 annual company fee because they produce HDCP-compliant products for televisions?
Despite my discovery that HDCP licensing is fairly cheap, Im still trying to find an answer. There must be a silver lining somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, existing cards can be retrofitted for HDCP support. Maybe its simply a matter of a BIOS flash where each board gets its own serial number. If that were true, the worse case scenario would be that customers would pay a few bucks for the HDCP license.
Turns out that this was also wishful thinking.
An ATI representative said: People will not be able to turn on HDCP through a software patch since the HDCP keys need to be present during the manufacturing. We are rolling out HDCP through OEMs at this time but we have not finalized our retail plans yet.
As I pressed for more information about potential retail plans (i.e. trade-in programs, whether existing boards already have traces for the HDCP hardware where it can be plugged in), I got only a vague response:
We cannot get into more detail at this time, as any further discussion would get into our trade secrets. However, we do promise to give you a full update on our retail plans once they are finalized.
Im not going to speculate on whether ATIs reticence is because theyre trying to downplay a big fiasco, or if theyre trying to keep their super generous solution secret to throw off the competition. Theres actually no way to know.
Well, what about NVIDIA? They were actually very direct: The boards themselves must be designed with an extra chip when the board is manufactured. The extra chip stores a crypto key, and you cannot retrofit an existing board after the board is produced.
Wow. You can pick your favorite expletive.
Who Do We Blame?
Blame Canada?
As ATI is a GPU and board manufacturer, Im disappointed that Built-by-ATI video cards lack HDCP support. Think about it. The GPU engineers are smart enough to know that their GPUs need to support HDCP, but their board engineers arent? Is it even possible to build a GPU without thinking about the board that has to go along with it? ATI is extremely reticent to give us any more details about Retail Plans. Maybe ATI owners will get lucky, and ATI will have some sort of free upgrade program. Maybe ATI owners will get shafted, and buyers of X1900XTs are going to find themselves with a video card that cannot play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray at 1920x1080. Who knows?
Blame Santa Clara?
What about NVIDIA? Personally, I think they have the least blood on their hand for two reasons. One, they arent a board manufacturer. That excuse alone wouldnt be good enough for me though.
What really gets them off the hook is that NVIDIA has been offering their board manufacturing partners designs with HDCP support since May 2005. Likewise, NVIDIA has actually shipped HDCP-enabled GeForce 6200 and 6600s in Sony Media Center PCs. Those boards just arent manufactured at retail. In retrospect, they did their part. It was the board manufacturers who failed us. I dont need to name names, because they ALL failed us.
Blame the other Santa Clara company?
HDCP is the brain-child of Intel, and now belongs to a spin-off company, Digital Content Protection, LLC. Theyre the ones who profit off all of the licensing fees. If HDCP licensing were cheaper, might we have seen more PC products with HDCP support? Possibly. It still seems to me that HDCP has relatively benign pricing when it comes to licensing. It's half a cent per item. If you compare that to licensing fees for HDMI, you'll see that while both have the same $15,000 annual fee, HDMI licensing is 4 cents/per unit (if you use the maximum discount as an example). Should we blame Intel for creating HDCP in the first place? I dont think so. HDCP was a technology made in response to Hollywoods requests. Blue laser technology can only go so far without content.
Blame Hollywood?
HDCP is an artificial requirement theres no reason why HD-DVD or Blu-Ray needs content protection. Although the movie industry is among the wealthiest of all industries, Hollywood has made things tougher in their paranoia of software piracy. Can we blame Hollywood for demanding HDCP? Maybe a little bit, but theyre not responsible for this current fiasco. Movie studios have done their fair part to make high-definition home video a possibility. From the get go, Hollywood made it clear that content protection was going to be necessary for high-definition video and they gave the electronics industry ample warning. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are coming in 2006. Television manufacturers have been putting HDCP into HDTVs from as far back as 2002. While Hollywood is certainly responsible for pressuring Microsoft into requiring HDCP for Windows Vista, they set their ground rules early on.
Is it our fault?
Think about it. If consumers and reviewers didnt use the terms GPU and graphics card interchangeably, this wouldnt be a problem. When it was disclosed that Microsoft required HDCP for high-definition HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback in Windows Vista, everyone turned their attention to monitors, assuming that GPUs would support it. We all know the what happens when you assume. Likewise, why didnt reviewers investigate if features in a GPU actually made it to the board level? Most importantly, we as consumers never clamored for HDCP support.
So in a way, even consumers are at fault, right? No way. Only the truly twisted would claim that the victims brought it upon themselves. Do any of us ask for Direct3D or OpenGL support? Its a given. Consumers never demanded HDCP support because it was already thought to be there.
Final thoughts
This is a tough situation. The PC world simply isnt ready for high-definition video playback via HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. There failures occurred at so many different levels. Ive probably burned a few bridges in this article, and I probably wont be reviewing any video cards in the near future. Nonetheless, this was a train that had already left the station. Keeping quiet about the problem wouldnt have stopped the customer outrage when Windows Vista was released. The solution to this problem isnt technical. Its political. I hope that board manufacturers will own up to the challenge and explain their actions to their customers. There's still time to come up with a solution.
Without a doubt, this is huge, startling news. As much as ATI and NVIDIA have been promoting H.264 decoding with their latest GPUs, its pretty shocking to see that apparently none of the shipping retail cards on the market have been built to take advantage of it. To add insult to injury, it appears that a line of Sony GeForce 6200s and 6600s offer HDCP support, yet the latest high-end GeForce 7800 GTX cards dont. Hows that for irony?
While some of you may not plan on upgrading to Vista at the end of this year, this is eventually going to affect you if you ever planned on watching hi-def movies on your PC in the future. Microsoft will eventually end support for Windows XP; already, their Games Division is planning Vista-exclusive titles such as Halo 2. It will only be a matter of time before other software developers follow suit, forcing anyone whos remotely interested in gaming to upgrade to Windows Vista.
Anyone with a GeForce 6/7 or Radeon X1K card who was planning on buying a BD-ROM or HD-DVD drive later this year for their PC may want to hold off on that purchase. Quite frankly, this article should affect the purchasing decisions of potentially anyone in the market for a new PC or graphics card right now thats even remotely interested in watching hi-def movies on their PC sometime in the future.
this comes from
http://www.fraggednation.com/forum.php?action=showPosts&topicID=4915
Or percieved piracy, I should say.
