AMD R600 doesn't have UVD

Wednesday 30th May 2007, 02:02:00 PM, written by Rys

It's not exactly news at this stage, but worth confirming here for those that don't have our surreptitious browser plug-in that forces you to read nothing but Beyond3D and icanhascheezburger: R600 doesn't have UVD.

Discussed to death in our forums and elsewhere, the misleading notion that R600 contains the UVD block, silicon jointly designed with Tensilica, should hopefully be no more. That some of AMD's partners for R600-based products carried the notion on their product marketing, and other skilled tech analysts elsewhere also had it in their copy, is comforting on one hand for us. But it's sadly not comforting for customers of the hardware expecting UVD's accelerated decode of high-complexity and high-bitrate motion video formats.

Instead, as we've fixed in our section on video processing in our R600 launch-day analysis, only RV630 and RV610 currently (well almost, they're not available to buy yet) contain UVD transistors. R600 makes do with a software solution that uses the programmable shader core for partial decode assist, and support for that will come in a driver to come soon.

Our sincere apologies to those that read our article and came away from it thinking UVD was in R600. We'll cover how R600's non-UVD approach works from an IQ and performance perspective in our upcoming pieces dedicated to those facets of the bigger picture, and we'll let you know when the driver enabling R600's non-UVD approach is available.

ati ± uvd, r600, rv610, rv630, icanhascheezburger

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