It's possible hardware acceleration isn't necessary for the higher level cards, as the GPU's have enough horsepower to handle the decoding at the driver level. I was a bit miffed too when I learned that ATI only planned on supporting H.264 with the X1000 series, leaving poor X800 series folks to upgrade their 'dated' hardware. My X800 based rig handles playback of content just fine tho, I've yet to see any frame drops or playback issues even with 1080p content.