GeForce 6 and 7 series have a dedicated 2D processor in charge of enhancing the quality of 2D videos executed by programs such as Windows Media Player. This feature was highly praised by nVidia when they released their GeForce 6 series and recently with the release of their GeForce 7 series. nVidia announces their chips from these series as “two-in-one”, since they have not only a 3D processor, but also a processor for enhancing 2D videos.

But there is an important detail that nVidia doesn’t tell: the 2D enhancements are not automatically enabled. I.e. just installing your GeForce 6 or 7 series video card is not enough to get the 2D video enhancements, you need to install an additional driver and configure Windows Media Player correctly. We will show you how this is done in this tutorial.

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, 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.

GeForce video cards from 6 and 7 series have 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.

Video cards based on GeForce 6 or 7 series offer two inverse telecine features to correct this problem, called inverse 3:2 and 2:2 pull-down.

There is also a third feature found on video cards from these series called bad edit correction or 3:2 & 2:2 correction, which correct errors generated by inverse telecine.

As we explained, even though GeForce 6 and 7 series video cards have these features, they are not automatically enabled. See how to enable them on the next page.