VDPAU hopes

The hottest topic on the MythTV users list right now is the VDPAU patches that are being worked on (or submitted actually). It seems that with a recent NVidia card, you could offload some of the workload of decoding to the GPU, thus saving CPU cycles. This is a very hot topic in computing right now, with the OpenCL inclusion in Snow Leopard and all... and for HTPCs it makse so much sense! Why have a very big CPU (and the huge fan for it) working overtime when some of the work could be done by processor made basically for computer graphics computations?

Me, however, I was not immediatelly not convinced that this would be a good solution for me, since I thought it would add the requirements of a second heavilly cooled processor to the box, and thus increasing noise. However, it seems that the G8 NVidia chips are available on more than a few motheboards as a built-in graphics solution. When upgrading, I will have to get med one of those... :-)