Albatron has recently announced the exciting new “Blue Ray Decoder Card” giving mainstream users a great alternative to Integrated Graphics. This low-profile VGA card can provide even the most basic systems with High Definition video playback including Blu-ray and HD-DVD. This card also supports DirectX 10, boosting 3D graphics performance for the Windows Vista operating system.

Blu-ray vs. DVD Video Playback
Blu-ray Disk, otherwise known as BD, is a revolutionary challenge to traditional DVD Video, offering almost twice the resolution (1920×1080 BD vs 720×576 DVD). Blu-ray uses a blue-laser (as opposed to traditional red lasers) whose color (blue) has a smaller wavelength allowing it to read smaller, more compacted data. Compacted data means that you can record more data on a Blu-ray disk; up to 50 GB on a two-sided Blu-ray disk, as opposed to only 8.5 GB on a 4 hour, two-sided DVD disk. HD-DVD is also another supported high definition standard which also uses blue-laser technology. HD-DVD data capacity is a little less than a Blu-ray Disk, but it still can store up to 30 GB of data (double sided). This card also supports the HDCP standard, required for Blu-ray video.

NVIDIA PureVideo HD and CPU Utilization
The technology behind this high performance, high definition video playback is NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD technology, embedded into the NVIDIA Geforce 8500GT GPU. One of the most practical aspects of this technology is that it focuses video playback mostly on the GPU, leaving your CPU to do other things. In fact, systems using Core 2 Duo processors with PureVideo HD usage has consistently shown CPU utilization under 20% during high definition video playback which also demonstrates up to a 60% reduction in CPU impact when using PureVideo HD versus using other technologies. This card also supports H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 encoding/compression formats used to record data on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks.