As the title reads, Firingsquad has a decent article covering what is new in the PureVideo for the 8500 and 8600 series. It explains the differenet video processors in the 8800 and 8500/8600 series.
Firingsquad The real innovation is the new H.264 Bitstream Processing Engine. This dedicated unit provides full H.264 decoding, including context-adaptive variable-length coding and context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CAVLC/CABLC) reverse entropy. Reverse entropy is the most computationally intensive step of the process and accounts for more than half of the decode time. Remember those movies that took a Core 2 Duo to its knees? With the GeForce 8600GT, you're looking at just 20% CPU utilization on that same system. Want another perspective? That same clip that took the Core 2 Duo to its knees? A GeForce 8600 and a Celeron 347 (3.06GHz Cedar Mill – like a 65nm Prescott) will be fine…
