PowerDVD XP 4.0 under GF4 quality?

[MtViewGuy]

I have a question regarding PowerDVD XP 4.0 with the Build 1811 patch (dated 24 July 2002).

I know that Cyberlink (the publisher of PowerDVD XP 4) has said with the current patch PowerDVD XP 4 will support the hardware acceleration functions for DVD playback on the GeForce4 MX and GeForce4 Ti4xxx GPU's (at least the hardware motion compensation and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform functions). Here's a BIG question: how good is the picture quality when I run PowerDVD in Windows 98/ME/XP using the GF4 cards? I will assume that DVD's mastered from a 24-frame per second movie should look quite good, but I've seen some graphics cards display very annoying anti-aliasing stair-stepping playing back DVD's mastered from a 30-frame per second video source when PowerDVD hardware acceleration mode is enabled. :mad:

I do know that the ATI Radeon VE/LE/7000/7200/7500 series cards display both film-based and video-based DVD's fine with hardware accleration enabled; what about GF4-based cards? :confused:

[saturnotaku]

I've never had good luck using PowerDVD hardware acceleration on any NVIDIA card. Anime looked especially horrific. On my GF4 MX-based laptop, PowerDVD wouldn't even run certain DVD's I owned when I installed the Intel Application Accelerator.

PowerDVD with software produced the best combination of surprisingly low CPU usage (~15-20%) and good quality. I use NVDVD now, though. That software takes advantage of the hardware features of the GF4 MX and looks absolutely stunning.