Well with AMD you have UVD on the OSS drivers or XvBA on Catalyst, while on Nvidia you have VDPAU on the blob or absolutely nothing on Nouveau.

As for Nvidia's chipsets, well they didn't drop it, they where forced out as Intel wouldn't allow them to make chipsets either, instead Intel and AMD both just license SLi capability from Nvidia.

It's going to be interesting over the next few years to see what happens to Nvidia, they where banking on their GPU expertise to allow them to dominate ARM, that didn't pan out. They where hoping that their Tesla series would dominate the GPGPU compute server market with their proprietary CUDA language, but now OpenCL is displacing it. Then they got pushed out of ALL current big name consoles and don't have any exclusivity with the SteamBox.

nVidia was not allowed by intel to make chipsets for iX, true. That doesnt stop them from making chipsets for AMD.

Nouveau does have hardware video decoding support-

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoAcceleration/

I dont think they are making desktop chipsets any more since am3 i think. More like Asrock&co are using the really old chipsets designed for the am2/2+ CPUs. I think 8200/8300 was the last chipset used, it was quite good, excellent video decoding, newer video chipset, more features, better performance, longer driver support and all + supported high FSB speeds - im surprised they are recycling the weak 7xxx series.

As far as drivers on nvidia go, i see absolutely no use for nouveau - the nvidia driver is very good and in contrast nouveau is very bad as they have to reverse engineer their stuff (i know nvidia gave away some specs lately, but that alone wont change much if they dont keep on doing it).

Why? I'd bet they are one of the cheapest chipsets around, and anyone who buys an nVidia chipset is more likely to get an nVidia GPU IMO.

They are obsolete and slow compared to the next gen 8xxx series (nvidia too, BTW) which are superior in every way. Not just IGP wise, but also the CPU has more bandwidth available.

There was a huge surplus left over and somebody who bought tons of them cheap was hoping to unload them fast enough they wouldn't get stuck with truckloads of them by the time that the AMD and Intel chipsets made them completely irrelevant.

Nvidia is struggling to still have diversity in their product line these days, thats why I'm so skeptical about their claims to have walked away from both the PS4 and Xbone of their own volition. Because doing so can end up costing them dearly in the PC gaming market if all of the console ports at the very least end up highly optimized for AMD's GPUs over Nvidia's. Gamers will only buy and recommend the GPUs that give the best performance for the dollar and if that ends up being AMD GPUs by 5-10FPS a every price point Nvidia will be down to just their diehards.

Obsolete? OK, but only a little less than the nVidia 8XXX chipsets.

Slow? I havent seen many nForce 630a vs AMD chipset comaprisons, and IRC there was only a tiny difference between the 630a and 8XXX on AM2+ Maybe it would be worse with AM3/AM3+.....but really, if you are after performance, nVidia chipsets havent been worth looking at since the AMD 8XX chipsets, even for the nVidai fanboi.

Is this theory? I wouldnt be suprised if nVidia is still making them, or were making them up to recently.

You and me both. Didnt they try to say or at least imply they walked away from apple as well?