4 - PureVideo HD (2)

PureVideo Continued ..

But let's take a look at the two new enhancing features. It's quite frankly a pain in the ass to show you this, as content protection will make it 100% impossible to make screenshots of high-Definition HD-DVD or Blu-Ray content. I ended up decoding a standard definition DVD where screenshots are allowed to be made without problems, yet the SD image quality is obviously far less fascinating due to the nature of the lower resolution, so differences are harder to spot.

We take frames from the Movie Gladiator, and try to spot the new enhancements.

Above we see the  baseline standard definition frame; post-processed and decoded with PureVideo. Perfectly fine SD image quality. All major functions are post-processed and decoded through NVIDIA's Purevideo engine (VP1/VP2).

Now the above picture shows the baseline movie decoding, lets enable Dynamic contrast enhancement. Again, really difficult to show you yet you can see that the frame is a little more vivid.

Now we disable Dynamic contrast enhancement again and enable Color Enhancement. Compare closely with the first frame and this one. Focus at the sky color. The color in this frame is just much better here.

The final result: here we have both new features enabled. The difference is really difficult to show you with still images. With a real-time-playing movie you will definitely notice the enhancements when you enable/disable them on the fly. Overall I do like these new features. Then again, you can manually tweak this with a little contrast, gamma and digital vibrance settings as well. But let me show you one more frame ...

Let's split the frames in two and compare with all interesting tweaks enabled. Two older features, edge enhancement and noise reduction obviously are also at your disposal. To the left the baseline (first) image, to the right the final result. Once we enable these as well and combine them with the Dynamic contrast enhancement and color enhancement option we see a distinct difference in image quality. Thanks to edge enhancement the frame is more sharp.

Now this petite comparison was based on SD content, yet PureVideo HD will allow it with 1080P content just as well. I've tested this and find the results rather satisfactory. Purevideo at work ladies and gentlemen ... enhancing and decoding over the GPU is a great thing. I do wish more container file-formats where supported for CPU decoding; x.264 for example is huge. Right now PureVideo HD is focusing it's GPU decoding at DVD, Blu-ray & HD-DVD content solely. And that's a true waste of transistors.

See NVIDIA's post processing features (when enabled in the NVIDIA control panel) should apply to pretty much any video content playback, except for a few applications like the Adobe Flash player that do not use the Microsoft Direct Show interface for video playback. The decode acceleration, on the other hand, is limited to CODECS that are compatible with the special dedicated video included in the GPUs. These include H.264, VC-1/WMV and MPEG-2. X.264, which is derived from the H.264 standard, could also be accelerated, unless the movie player application that you use has it own playback API and is not using the Microsoft Direct Show API.

We'll now have a look at each individual card we test today, guided by photo's. Next page please.