One of the most exciting feature of the new 8600 and 8500 is a completely new video processing engine (VP2 + BSP + AES128 Engine) which offloads 100% of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD processing from the CPU. While the previous G80 core did come equipped with PureVideo HD functionality, the new core architecture has changed the way it works. Before the GeForce 8800 cards would off-load some of the cycles from CPU to GPU when decoding HD-DVD or BLU-RAY movies. Now with the 8600 and 8500 cards, the video processing load will be completely handled by the GPU, allowing the CPU to handle other computations and avoid framerate drops during video playback.



Link: Neoseeker