Conclusion
With the Winter update for Avivo we can begin to see that the technology is maturing as more of its facets are coming to the fore.
On the display side, we've seen the dual-link DVI output in operation with Dell's 30" digital display, and performances with both single boards and Crossfire at the highest resolutions that can be driven with such outputs. The 10-bit display pipelines should be assisting in improving the quality of the display outputs, but its difficult to judge - while ATI will be working with notebook vendors to create specific profiles for the notebook panels, it might be nice if they could also work with high profile panel vendors to provide specific Avivo support with certain panels. On the display side, we've yet to see any of the HDCP capabilities in place which will become more important with even some PC panels, such as the aforementioned Dell, including HDCP and high definition optical readers coming in 2006. Some of ATI's partners, though, have already been experimenting with HDMI outputs for X1000 boards.
On the video Transcoding side the Avivo Video Converter utility displays ATI's capability for increasing the speed of video transcoding. Other than very quick and dirty conversions though, in its current form its likely to have both limited support and use. We suspect the transcoding solution is still in the early phase of its life just now, and either it will go nowhere from here or it will actually be adopted by software vendors for proper implementations in their applications. Should independent software vendors pick this up then it would be reasonable to expect better control options, hence resolution and scaling options, and ATI can also change the API's back end so that it operates over the graphics hardware potentially bringing in quality and further performance improvements.The Avivo Winter Update also finally sees the first implementation of H.264 video acceleration. Judging by the performances seen here, though, perhaps there could still be some further optimisation to occur, as the CPU utilisation with hardware acceleration isn't too different from the pure software decoding on an FX53 CPU. Of course, most users, especially those with notebooks, aren't going to be using CPU's of this performance and the differences will be greater with lower performance CPU's. By the time new PC's and notebooks commonly start shipping with high definition optical drives, though, the common CPU's shipping in those systems will certainly have scaled up as well.
Finally, possibly the most important element to many users currently, is that of playback performance of video as it stands now, and it's with the quality aspects where the Avivo Winter Update makes the greatest strides. For the most part it's with interlacing and cadence detection that ATI have significantly increased their quality, with de-interlacing benefiting any interlaced source, including live feeds from a TV tuner source (such as an add-in TV tuner board, a video-input to the graphics card or a tuner on an All-In-Wonder board), and the cadence detection benefiting sources filmed at different FPS's, which is frequently going to occur with DVD's and their transfer from 24 FPS film. Further quality improvements appear to have been realised with the Catalyst 6.4 drivers as well, apparently giving ATI only few places left to improve!
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