Digital Home Thoughts: ATI Goes for DominATIon

"A few months ago ATI finally launched its response to nVidia’s 7800 series of GeForce GPU in the form of the X1000 series of graphics processors. While the battle for 3D gaming performance is at the heart of the graphics card, ATI hoped to gain extra brownie points by announcing its AVIVO platform. This is a technology that according to ATI was designed to provide the optimal video experience on the PC. The headline feature was hardware support for H.264 but this actually proved to be something of a damp squib as there was no driver support. However, this is set to change as at a press conference a couple of weeks ago, ATI revealed to the press that on December 22nd it will make Catalyst 5.13 available for download, which will finally enable hardware the assisted acceleration of H.264 on the X1000 series. For it to work you need a Radeon X1K series card, the Catalyst 5.13 drivers and a decoder, which will shortly be released by Cyberlink."



AVIVO consists of three things – Image quality, connectivity and HD Video. Avivo does 3D Comb Filtering, which reduces image artefacts, 10-bit internal colour processing and a high quality TV-Out. It natively supports dual-link DVI, which means that the cards can be used to connect very high resolution screens such as Apple’s 30in display with a native resolution of 2,560 x 1,600. The big news is the H.264 hardware acceleration support. H.264 is a variant of MPEG4 that’s designed as a successor to MPEG2, offering equal quality but at far lower bit-rates, making it around two to three times more space efficient. So finally, a video card manufacturer is focusing on something other than just pure FPS. Like the article, I recommend this solution.