HDCP-enabled Radeon X1950XTX is on the way

ATI'S RADEON X1950 XTX will feature HDCP support. People are getting crazy about this content protection stuff, so many will be miffed that the new old ATI card will support it.

Our crystal balls suggest Blu-ray and HD DVD will become a very popular storage formats and big business interests want to ensure they should not play content without a card that supports HDCP.

However, a source at Sony suggested a while back that the firm might exclude the HDCP support from its first generation Blu-ray devices.

Sony is set to ship the first Blu-ray PC drives in August at which time they will be too few HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) enabled graphics cards available to support it.

The Sony drives and the recordable discs will cost a small fortune as the drive is set to cost around €1000 at launch day and the 25GB recordable disc around €15 at launch.

We still don't know whether ATI will use the Silicon Image chip to enable HDCP, as this chip is still in short supply, but there are some indications that its chip can support it natively.

There will be two versions of the card one with HDCP bios and the one without and we are sure that the first one will end up a few bucks more expensive. µ