PureVideo still needed/useful?

[ssnyder]

My wife has a GeForce 7600GS-based video card, driven by the latest Win32 WHQL NVidia drivers. She also has the PureVideo driver (the original one, not PureVideo HD) installed.

Given the current Geforce drivers, is there any point to having PureVideo installed?

It is used by (the also installed) PowerDVD and possibly by Windows Media Player. My wife is a heavy user of both programs. I'm not clear if the PureVideo functionality has been rolled into the standard GeForce drivers or if the stand-alone PureVideo driver is really still needed to exploit the hardware video decode support in the 7600GS. I'd prefer not to have superfluous software installed on her machine.

So: do I need to have the PureVideo software installed to fully utilize the 7600GS for video decode, or does just having the latest GeForce driver provide that functionality?

Thanks.

[Eliminator]

yes its an mpeg2 decoder and its by far the best one... if you watch any mpeg2 videos like dvd's and hd streams then you should keep it

[crainger]

It's great for XP, but not needed for Vista. Wont even install.

[-=DVS=-]

Works with Vista 32bit , but not with Vista 64. Tested using Media Player Classic.

[crainger]

For reals. I thought Vista had support built in and Nvidia recommended not to install it under Vista.

[t3hl33td4rg0n]

The nstant media app still works in vista x64, and it actually plays all the formats!

also, with a hex editor you can get it to play mkv files!