Hardware acceleration of h.264 with ATI

All those who have tried to watch the trailers in h.264 have probably noticed that it requires a lot of processing power. It is especially true for 1080p video, which is only playable on the most powerful of Macs.
Things could very well change with the arrival of hardware acceleration via the video card.
On December 22nd, ATi will release drivers which will be able to decode video on the X1000 series of video cards. Only the X1800 will be able to decode 1080p material, while the other will support up to 720p.
NVidea should also be releasing support for this kind of acceleration for it's latest video cards in January. As usual, all we can do it hope (and request?) that the optimized divers will eventually find their way to the Mac.
[Update] Présence PC has an article [in French] on the AVIVO technology from ATI. It has been discovered that contrary to what was thought, the transcoder is a pure hardware solution, without any acceleration from the graphics card.