H.264 Hardware: Geforce 8500 vs 8600?

Hi, I'm going to get a new GFX card for hardware H.264 decoding, I'm thinking of going for the 8500. I never ever play games. I don't want to spend the extra money on the 8600 for no reason. Does the 8600 offer any improvement in H.264 decoding over the 8500 or are they the same? I've seen Anandtech benchmarks of the 8600, but no comparison against the 8500 for H.264. Thanks.

They use the exact same decoding chip. What I don't know is whether they use it for deinterlacing as well, or if that's tied to shaders, but I'd reasonably expect the 8500 would do 1080i just as well.

AFAIK, the main 'extra' benefit is for the gamers. So i'd say no There is pdf file available on nVidia's website where it compares the main features of various cards. But I can't locate it atm. Perhaps will help you to decide. Goodluck :)

Thanks! Looks like the 8500 will do the job all right. From that handy PDF: "H.264 and VC-1 Decode Acceleration is not currently supported un Windows XP for the 8600 and 8500 series GPUs. This support will be added in upcoming ForceWare drivers release." Has XP support been added now?

Hey PlazzTT, One leetle heads up: the HDCP feature may be important to you down the road. If not any 8400 or 8500 will do for most of the 8600s have that feature, not the 84 or 85.

So does actual GPU speed play no real role in the decoding capabilities? I have a 7900 GTO, and have often considered upgrading to a PureVideo2-capable card.

On 8800 and the whole 7 series, it does, because they use shader pipelines to do the decoding. 8500 & 8600 have a dedicated decoding chip. (probably 8400 too? apparently it supports purevideo HD, unlike 8300.) On most of the 7-series you can't do both decoding HD and motion-adaptive deinterlacing at once.