AMD is now shipping ATI Radeon 2400 and 2600 video cards to board customers. Both these graphics cards are DirectX 10 compliant and are designed for Windows Vista. Also featured on both the 2400 and 2600 is AMD’s Unified Video Decoder, which is a hardware feature, designed to offload video decoding from the CPU to the GPU, just like NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD.

Both the ATI HD 2400 and HD 2600 video cards are designed for entry level to mid range systems where the UVD technology is beneficial due to slower processor speeds. In higher-end systems with more powerful processors where the ATI HD 2900 will be used, UVD is not included.

HDMI and HDCP support are included with both these cards so decoding Blu-ray and HD DVD films is possible. These cards are both built on a 65nm process, the HD 2400 has 40 stream processors, and the HD 2600 has 120 stream processors. Via AMD press release