I got a Asus Nvidia ge-force gt710 and installed in my HTPC. I am blown away to say the least - the black levels/contrast on the sony 45 vpl hw45es are at-least 20-30% better than using the built in GPU and perhaps 15-20% better than the popcorn hour MP I was using, and overall PQ both with J-river and netflix has become significantly better - color saturation, shadow detail etc. I am so impressed I am going to build a custom HTPC just for video with a totl GPU. Also no stutters with advanced MadVR settings. IMO all these so-called media players are just scratching the surface of video, I think the real deal is getting a high horse power machine with the best GPU card one can afford. I feel that past 2-3 years I have been loosing a lot of PQ with these 20-30k media players, hopefully I can catch up soon, especially since I plan to upgrade to a native 4k projector. Fm's, please suggest components for a nice HTPC (mother board, GPU, processor etc) around 1-1.5 lac range. Sad part is there is no proper guidance as to what one can buy off the shelf for best PQ other than a 4k disc player, one gets bombarded with so-called media players, which imo cannot really match the level of even a entry level htpc with a proper purpose built GPU.
Cheers,
Sid