Alan?s first-hand impressions on NVIDIA PureVideo HD with HD-DVD -- comparisons to CoreAVC included. Every GeForce 6 and 7 with PureVideo (excluding the AGP versions of the 6800 Ultra/GT, and 6100) has a dedicated programmable video processing unit (VPU) on the physical chip. This programmable VPU is separate from the other parts of the GeForce that deal with video (like the scaler) and is also separate from the GPU shader part of the chip. It?s like having a dual-core CPU ? one core is the regular GPU, and another core is a completely different VPU or thinking about the Vector Units in the Sony Emotion Engine in the PS2.

Although NVIDIA does not provide specific details about the underlying architecture of PureVideo, our best analysis suggests that the GeForce?s video processing pipeline involves several elements :

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