Before you run out and get a video card that supports the HDCP standard that Windows Vista will try to impose on video cards and monitors to play protected content at their full resolution, you might be surprised to find out that the cards currently out on the market don’t really support the standard as well as you might hope.

Although ATI has had “HDCP support” in their GPUs since the Radeon 8500, and NVIDIA has had “HDCP support” in their GPUs since the GeForce FX5700, it turns out that things are more complicated — just because the GPU itself supports HDCP doesn’t mean that the graphics card can output a DVI/HDCP compliant stream. There needs to be additional support at the board level, which includes licensing the HDCP decoding keys from the Digital Content Protection, LLC (a spin-off corporation within the walls of Intel).

It was the board manufacturers who failed us. I don’t need to name names, because they ALL failed us.

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