ATI and nVidia crush high-end DVD players

Avivo and PureVideo

ATI and nVidia are both trying to convince consumers that their technology will produce the best video quality. Each has given the combination of soft- and hardware that is supposed to produce this quality a different name; ATI calls it Avivo, nVidia has named their technology PureVideo.

Both however are no more than a marketing term for a combination of hard and software technologies that handle video. Both manufacturers offer drivers with the possibility to optimize playing video through the GPU, i.e. the 3D chip can take care of deinterlacing and scaling video (we will explain these terms further on in this article), and the processing power of the GPU can be used to decrease image distortion. Acceleration for MPEG2 video has been present on graphics cards for quite some time now, but this has also been incorporated into the Avivo and PureVideo technologies. nVidia takes thing a step further and provide their own MPEG2 decoder called PureVideo Decoder that can be used in media centre machines. ATI have not developed their own decoder, but do have a tight relationship with companies like Cyberlink and Intervideo.