Nvidia graphics tech powers first Blu-ray PC

Nvidia Corp. announced that the world's first PCs equipped with Blu-ray Disc drives, Sony VAIO PCs, features its GeForce GPUs, which include the company's PureVideo HD technology.

Blu-ray is a new high definition (HD) video disc standard that offers up to six times the visual detail of traditional DVDs. Blu-ray discs can hold up to 25Gbytes on a single-layer disc and 50Gbytes on a dual-layer disc. This extra capacity combined with the use of advanced video and audio codecs offers consumers an amazing HD experience. Sony's VAIO RC desktop and AR notebook are the world's first PCs that will let consumers play Blu-ray discs on their computers.

The VAIO RC desktop features the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT GPU, while the VAIO AR notebook uses an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600-series GPU. The GeForce 7 series of GPUs features advanced technologies including H.264 and MPEG2 hardware; support for the latest games and applications with DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0; 3D architecture built for Microsoft Windows Vista and NVIDIA PowerMizer technology for reduced power consumption.

In addition, Nvidia PureVideo HD technology provides hardware acceleration for decoding H.264 and MPEG-2 movies. The PureVideo discrete video processing core offloads the CPU and 3D engine of complex video tasks, freeing the PC to run multiple applications simultaneously, while consuming less power.