Collectively called PureVideo by NVIDIA, 2D image enhancements were added basically to improve 2D video quality, basically correcting interlacing and telecine.

Videos originally targeted to TVs are interlaced, because that's they way TVs work. In interlacing, each video frame has only half of the total lines available. Video monitors used by computers uses non-interlaced scanning (a.k.a. progressive scanning), which is capable of showing all line available per frame, so when reproducing this kind of video on your computer, you can see it doesn't have the best possible quality. So, GeForce 7800 GTX has a de-interlacing engine, that creates the missing lines from each video frame, thus improving 2D video quality.

When movies are converted to video, another problem arises. Movies are shot at 24 frames per second, while videos on TV should be played at 30 frames per second. So the movie must go to a process called telecine, which creates those 6 frames per second that are missing. Sometimes, however, this process is not very well done and you can see that the image quality isn't optimal. GeForce 7800 GTX offers two inverse telecine features to correct this problem, called inverse 3:2 and 2:2 pull-down.

Read our tutorial Enabling 2D Enhancements on GeForce 6 and 7 Series to learn how to enable these features on your video card - if you have a GeForce 6 or 7 series, of course.