Hi guys,

I have a unique problem. The following is my setup:

* Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 3.2 Ghz watercooled running very cool @ 35c even on load

* 2 GB DDR2 G Skill Ram

* 750GB (2 drives - lots of space left on system and backup partition)

* Asus EN 8800 Ultra 768MB on Forceware 169.25 / video bios version 60.80.18.00.12

* desktop and workspace resolution - 2560x1600

* Two PSUs powering the system (550w antec true power and 300w generic psu - enough power for sure)

* Vista 32bit newest drivers

* Matrox Community Pack for MKV, FLV, H.264 etc based codec format playback
* Media Player Classic
* Power DVD 7.3 Ultra with its H.264 codec

So it's a pretty beefy system by local standards with all the necessary software to playback High Def Movie rips available on torrents and other *uhem* helpful sources

Problem:

have obtained the following HD movies all encoded using H.264:

* Doom 720p (1024x768) around 4.3Gb
* Transformers 1080p (1920x1080) around 9.5GB
* matrix trilogy 1080p (1920x1080) around 9.5GB

With the default Matrox video codecs loaded and using Media Player Classic I get the following CPU utilizations

* Doom - around 50%-60% peak on single core
* transformers and matrix trilogy - up to 100%

as you might guess, I'm having SEVERE lag in most action packed sequences which makes the system skip frames also misalligns the video from the audio for the 1080p movies

Hypothesis
Obviously looks like there is no GPU based hardware acceleration thus every bit of decoding for H.264 codec is being handled by my poor E6400

Worst, its being done on a single thread not utilizing my 2nd core

First Easy Solution
Get a multi threaded decoder for H.264 and force Media Player Classic to use it - Power DVD Ultra 7 has a nice H.264 decoder thats multi threaded so i decided to install it and force media player classic to prefer that decoder over its native FFDSHow decoder.

Result of first Solution
Smooth Acceptable playback - with nearly 80% average utilization of Both F'ng cores - at least I can watch the movies now

But where the F is the H.264 hardware acceleration from my 80k behemoth of a GPU?

If someone can please tell me whether they have tried something similar to this and have any results to share where they can watch a 1080 movie on a NV80 based 8800 model gpu with hardware acceleration for MKV files (H.264 based)

I saw an article on anandtech where they show an 8600/8500 use on 25% cpu where gpu does the rest.

Please help if you have any info on this - I WANT HARDWARE ACCELERATION FOR H.264