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FiringSquad: With PPUs on the way, do you envision a day where the VPU becomes a separate chip from the 3D-GPU?

Scott Vouri: The nice thing about having separate video processing cores in our GPUs is that we can move those blocks into any product we want. For example, we recently announced the nForce MCP 430 and GeForce 6150 motherboard solution. This provides PureVideo HD processing with component out without the need for a discrete graphics card. We also offer video processing technology on mobile phones. I can envision many other applications of our PureVideo technology, especially in the consumer electronics field, where our video processing technology will be highly valued.

FiringSquad: Does the VMR offer higher precision computation than the overlay when converting YUV to RGB?

Scott Vouri: Yes. The VMR mode, which provides advanced features such as support for extended color space, allows higher precision computation than overlay mode.

[Alan comments: In this case, you guys will want to enable the High Quality mode inside of Windows Media Player to force VMR playback. One good way to test this is the Print-Screen test. If you can capture video using the Print Screen button, it's going through the VMR. If you just get a black screen, it's going through the overlay.]

FiringSquad: What sort of software do I need to utilize the noise reduction feature of PureVideo for MPEG encoding? Is there anyway to use this in the decoding stage?

Scott Vouri: This is a feature of an unannounced product so I can’t comment.

[Alan's comments: Actually the feature is described in figure 3 of page 7 of NVIDIA's Technical Brief on PureVideo http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_16213.html]

So in essence, NVIDIA has confirmed that a future product is going to have noise reduction for MPEG encoding.]

FiringSquad: PureVideo seems to do more than regular bob deinterlacing when tested with the HQV Benchmark DVD. Can you give us any more details on what's being done?

Scott Vouri: Yes, we do much more than regular ‘bob’ deinterlacing, but unfortunately we can’t disclose the algorithms behind our de-interlacing technology. I do want to point out that HQV doesn’t even test one of the best things about our spatial-temporal de-interlacing – the fact that we do it on 1080i HD content, which is quite computationally intensive.

[Alan's comments: This is actually the same answer that ATI gave us, so that's still a fair answer. NVIDIA's point about high-definition deinterlacing is well taken. We'll actually be looking into a de-interlacing shoot-out between ATI and NVIDIA in the future, and high-definition test patterns are going to be a component of that future article.