Video play is not created equal: Our quality and performance analysis shows quality gaps exist between the video processing and acceleration technologies used by ATI's Radeon X1000 and Nvidia's Geforce 7 generation.

nVidia maybe won this fight for 5 points, but you have to pay for it :? , making ATI the winner.

What a surprise, those of us in the UK are currently prevented from viewing this article - *again* - because the UK site hasn't updated and your extremely poor geolocation system prevents UK users using the US site, while French, German, etc etc users are allowed to choose whatever site they like.

When it comes right down to it, the detail (in distance) is the ONLY setting that nVids got an advantage over ati. Though other settings ati is slightly better in most with nVvid winning maybe 1? And like said before, you have to PAY for it? And then pay again as it surely uses more cpu. And wheres the comments of nVids encoder? All I read was complaints about REPORTS on the INTERNET of all places (go figure) of ati's supposed abilities regaurding this (using the hardware itself) and how thats so bad of them, assuming ati's claim of acceleration is from their hardware. I saw no quotes regaurding ati directly claiming their gpu's were responsible for this supposed acceleration and NOT the cpu. I would like that clarified before bashing ati. Either way, ati's solution is free as it comes with their gpus and nVids is an paid for add on. I like free, or included, so for value and power consumption ati's current solution is clearly the winner here

Maybe it's me or maybe it's De Ja Vu.....

But didn't I read this same article a few weeks ago???

The previous article was missing a few things and was not done with up to date nVidia drivers. Therefore it was pulled and re-done / re-written.

nVidia really does need a free decoder, what you are paying for is the inlcusion of dolby digital decoding.

yeah and did ATI not win

its a conspiracy!!!

Until you take 5 minutes to search the internet and get purevideo for free

dolby digital decoding? forgive my ignorance, but dolby digital is an audio format right? what does that have to do with 2D DVD video decoding? Would the dolby digital not be handled by the sound card?

Believe me I'm not trying to just give you a hard time, this is very important to me because I just put in a dolby digital sound card (Auzentech) into my (super cheap) HTPC, and now DVD playback is choppy and my cpu utilization is at 100% (it's only a 1ghz processor though). It could play DVD's just fine before I added the sound card, I would have expected the sound card to take work AWAY from the PC, but it seems to have added??

Until you take 5 minutes to search the internet and get purevideo for free

Until you take 5 minutes to search the internet and get purevideo for free

Was the Purevideo de-interlacer set to Automatic or Smart?

I have used both a 6600GT and a X1600 and have learned something I thought very odd. I have XP MCE which naturally comes without a DVD decoder. The DVD MPEG decoder is also needed to watch HD TV. I first tried the X1600 with an old PowerDVD MPEG decoder and that really worked poorly with horrific nonexistent deinterlacing (but no Jutter). I then purchased the PureVideo decoder and naturally I switched to the 6600GT. This fixed the interlace problem in HD, but I dropped a lot of frames (Jutter). I thought I was really stuck until I tried the PureVideo decoder with the X1600. To my delight and surprise this worked great!
I've never seen anyone mention this hybrid Ati-NVidia combination before.

Nvidia cards no longer need to use the Purevideo encoder for hardware acceleration, they now work with any encoder that supports hardware acceleration like the ones that come withPowerDVD or Showtime...

Hi guys, it's me the author, and I want you to know that Nvidia cards no longer require a special purevideo decoder like the first version of the article stated...

It was this change that prompted us to pull the entire article and rewrite it.

As it stands, Ati and Nvidia are on an almost even keel now: Nvidia has slightly better sharpening or 'enhancement', but Ati's is still very good. Other than that they're both so close to perfect it's uncanny.

I apologise for any confusion.

What I want to know is this:

Does the 6600gt support these functions as well?
I haven't upgraded my drivers since 84.21 came out (since they are so stable I saw no need to), but if the new drivers will unlock some new purevideo features in the control panel, then I'd be willing to upgrade, so long as they will work with the 6600gt.

Anyone know?

I know the article is about hardware accelerated decoding, but it would be nice if the software contender could be something like Media Player Classic + ffdshow.