NVidia PureVideo - Worth upgrading to.. for a HTPC?

[Jeomite]

I am currently running an ATI Radeon 9500 Pro through to my 55" Mitsibishi Rear-Projection CRT. It's running fine at 1080i (1920x1080), but on some video files such as 640x480 TVRips or even some XviD DVDRips, they play with some artifacts.

I noticed the new line of GeForce 6 video cards have a technology called NVidia PureVideo which supposedingly improves upscaling the video and other video quality improvements. Would it be worth to upgrade my video card to the nVidia GeForce 6600 GT?

 

[Snakexor]

yea, get a 6600gt, dont look at 6800 lines, pvp is locked on those

 

[imported_ST]

if you have a powerful enough system, ffdshow is all that's required:

http://htpcnews.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=17427

 

[Todd33]

I found Purevideo to be a gimick. I've spent some time with it in SageTV and found o improvment in image quality, yet it has hefty resource requirements and cost $15.

 

[videopho]

I use it for my ATI HDTV tuner and pretty happy with it. You can upgrade it for a bit more to get DTS or AC3 sound decoder for your home theater surround sound system.

 

[Thor86]

You can run just the Nvidia decoder on ATI cards, no problems.

Download the TRIAL Software here.

 

[gsellis]

FTR, the PVP is not locked on the 6800. It is broken and nVidia did nothing to fix it except change all of the 6800 documentation to remove the references to it.

No, it is not a gimmick. Going forward, nVidia has stated publicly that they will be able to implement H.264 decode via the video card using the PVP. I forget though if they only stated in the 7xxx line or if it included the 6xxx. Maybe one of the nVidia enthusiast can dig out the details. And, as stated, nVidia has released their own codec for MPEG-2 that supports using the video card for decode. It works well. And yes, it costs extra. That is because the Motion Picture Expert Group requires you pay a licensing fee for the MPEG encode/decode 'code'. They are passing along the cost.

Edit - Adding that I have not built a HTPC using one. I have built a Media Center machine as a proof of concept and can say that processor, disk space, and memory are also very important as well as a good audio card.

 

[mehmetmunur]

I have been comparing Purevideo with ffdshow results, and on stills, the pictures look so much better. But you would probably need a good CPU to resize the pictures to 19*10. I am having difficulty with 12*10 and my Athlon XP 3200+ @ 2.2Ghz, granted it is a few years old. But if you have a radeon 9500, you are probably in the same boat as I am if not worse, since I already have a 6600GT.
In other words, you may not have to use Purevideo, and might get better results with FFDshow.