X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X1000: Brand-New Graphics Architecture from ATI Explored (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 10/05/2005 | 12:05 PM ]

ATI Avivo: New Era in Video Processing

Even the RADEON 9700, the world’s first DirectX 9-compatible GPU, already had some abilities to process video streams with the help of pixel shaders, but no progress has been made in the ATI camp since then. The video-processing skills of RADEON X800/X850 chips were rather poor if compared with GPUs from NVIDIA or S3. The RADEON X1000 architecture comes to change this situation. Developing the new GPU series, ATI caused a mini-revolution in video-processing, too, by endowing the new-generation GPUs with hardware H.264 and VC-1 encoding and decoding capabilities. These two formats are the basis of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD standards, respectively.

Avivo engine

Besides that, the Avivo Display Engine – this is the name of the new video-processing technology from ATI – includes two independent 10-bit engines each of which supports overlays, high-quality gamma correction, color correction, image scaling and de-interlacing. The signal is encoded into a TV-friendly format with a Xilleon chip which was originally developed for hi-end home HDTV devices.

Such powerful video-processing capabilities seem to be the most appealing in the RADEON X1300 graphics card. Thus inexpensive model has the lowest heat dissipation and power consumption in the family and thus can be an optimal choice for a high-quality home multimedia center.

We’ve been talking about the RADEON X1000 architecture in general so far. The next section is concerned with particular graphics card models that represent the new architecture. We want to express our sincere thanks to ATI Technologies for providing us with the following cards:

• RADEON X1800 XT
• RADEON X1800 XL
• RADEON X1600 XT
• RADEON X1300 PRO

We will scrutinize these devices in a number of theoretical tests and will also check them in the new FSAA and anisotropic filtering modes developed and implemented by ATI Technologies.