Unfortunately there is no way of capturing “before” and “after” screenshots to show you here. Even though we can capture the “before” screenshots – i.e. without using the video card processor –, it is not possible to capture the “after” screenshots. The explanation is simple. Since it is the video card that is performing the video decoding, it is throwing all decoded video directly to the video monitor, bypassing Windows. The only way of capturing a screenshot would be using a capture device connected to the video output used to connect the video card to the video monitor. Unfortunately we don’t have a board like this. You could take some pictures, but the final result wouldn’t be good.

However, we are putting a document called NVIDIA PureVideo Reviewers Guide for downloading here. In this document you will not only find several “before” and “after” screenshots but also more details on Windows Media Player 10 and nVidia decoder that we didn’t mention.

On the other hand, we could see numerically the efficiency of using the video card’s decoder instead of using the system’s CPU to decode 2D videos. When playing a video before configuring the video card decoder, the CPU load was between 8% and 18%. When we switched the video decoding to the video card the CPU load was between 2% and 3%, really impressive. Since we were using a very high-end computer (Pentium 4 3.4 GHz with a GeForce 7800 GTX) you will probably have a better benefit if you use a less powerful system.