Final Words

Well, was it worth the wait? Considering that PureVideo came as a free feature on GeForce 6 cards, it's more like unwrapping an early Christmas present - one that we were promised eight months ago.

NVIDIA's image quality is pretty good for a PC DVD decoder, PureVideo delivered de-interlacing image quality that was equal to and in some cases better than what ATI brought to the table. And although we did not feature the comparison here, the NVIDIA PureVideo codec even offered better image quality than the latest DScaler 5 build.

Despite doing better than the competition, NVIDIA still is far from perfect with PureVideo. The Big Lebowski test was proof alone that there's still room for improvement.

The scaling quality and WMV9 playback were both quite competitive with ATI's offerings, although not strikingly better. With hardware acceleration enabled, WMV9 acceleration is promising and will greatly reduce the CPU requirements for high definition content playback.

Overall we're pleased with PureVideo, there's very little to complain about. We aren't as happy with it as we could have been, but we mostly have issue with the way NVIDIA handled the entire situation remaining quiet for far too long. Not to mention that there can't be too many happy 6800GT owners out there knowing that 6600GT owners will have lower CPU utilization when playing WMV9-HD files.

In the end, PureVideo is a positive feature for GeForce 6 owners, a verdict that we are glad we can finally give.