Which gives best image quality? Nvidia + Purevideo or ATi + Cyberlink decoders

[theKramer]

The title says it all
I have always thought that ATi h/w give the best IQ, but think I spotted somewhere that an Nvidia card with Purevideo is best. Is that correct?

What about Nvidia for TV tuners? Are they any good?

Thx.

[mayamaniac]

I think you can use PureVideo on any video cards, not just nvidia, although the latest nvidia 7xxx series have some hardware acceleration. PureVideo produces the best picture quality while uses the least amount of CPU resource.

The nVidia tuner is good from what I read about it, but you still can't install more than two cards on the same machine. It is a driver issue and I'm not sure if they fixed it yet.

[jkohn]

My experience is that you want to use PureVideo with NVidia cards and PowerDVD with ATI cards. I found PureVideo just doesn't work very well with ATI cards. In my newly built core2 duo system with a PCIe Radeon x1600, the PureVideo decoders couldn't smoothly play back 1080i HD, even in overlay mode. Installing PowerDVD fixed the problem and now 1080i playback is very smooth using either overlay or VMR9 FSE modes. (Interestingly overlay mode produces noticeably better image quality with the x1600 and PowerDVD).

As for whether the NVidia/PureVideo combo or the ATI/PowerDVD combo is better, I'd say it's pretty close. I think the ATI combo might have a slight edge in noise and color smoothness over NVidia.

[Fluffdaddy]

I have a ATI 9800 pro. Works great with PureVideo. I prefer PureVideo with TV recordings SD & HD,but for DVD playback I love Powerdvd 6.0