ATI All In Wonder X1800XL Video Card Review :: AVIVO

AVIVO or Advanced Video In-Video-Out is ATI's code name for their suite of advanced technologies the X1K series brings to improve display technologies to bring a better multimedia experience with their next generation X1K cards. There are 5 stages to the AVIVO Video path: Capture, Encode, Decode, Process and finally Display.

The Capture stage is where the device captures video such as an A-I-W X1800XL capturing television signal from the antenna. Digital capture finds the signal and demodulates the signal from the signal that carries it. A HDTV Wonder, for example will take Over the Air Broadcast signals without worrying about signal strength. For an analogue source, there needs to be an analog to digital converter step (ADC). The AVIVO engine uses a 12-bit ADC to convert the analog signal to digital frame data. At this point the signal and filters it. The A-I-W X1800XL has a 3D comb filter. The 3D comb filter separates the data into black and white and color components, with the third component being time.

The second stage is the Encoding stage. The Theater 200 chip on the A-I-W X1800XL is capable of hardware encoding of MPEG-2 files. A DVD movie is usually done in MPEG-2 format, and digital television in Europe. H.264 is the next big thing in videos with it being used in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as a compression scheme to display High Definition video. Apple has Quicktime trailers of Spiderman 2 and Batman Begins on their Quicktime website. H.264 takes a lot of processing power and the X1K series is the first video card generation to allow hardware assist of H.264 encoding.

The next step is Decode. ATI says the X1K will enable Blu-Ray Disc and HD-DVD playback using the graphics card to perform the in-loop deblocking, motion compensation and inverse transform portions of H.264 decoding. De-blocking is used to alleviate the problem of low bit-rate streams by smoothing the edges of the blocks. Motion compensation is the way of describing the difference between consecutive frames in terms of the where each section of the former frame has moved to.

The Post-Processing stage of the Video path is where de-interlacing, frame-rate conversions, scaling of the video output to match the desired resolution and color correction. Avivo introduces vector adaptive de-interlacing to video cards. Avivo also contains both a pre-scaling engine which scales the video from the source resolution to the requested application resolution and a post-scaling engine to fit to the display.

The final stage of the video path is the display. The X1K series of cards has dual 10-bit per component display pipelines. Matrox introduced 10-bit per component DACs on their Parhelia, but ATI has it before the DACs. The display pipelines do Gamma Correction, Color Correction, and Video Scaling at 10-bit precision. 10-bit precision means a palette of over a billion colors versus the 16.7 million colors possible with previous video cards. The RAMDAC on the A-I-W X1800XL is still 400MHz, but ATI includes two TMDS transmitters to allow for resolutions of 2048x1536 with a 75Hz refresh rate for two different DVI monitors.

Theatre 200 Chip

ATI provided a Theater 200 chip with the A-I-W X1800XL card. First introduced in 2002 with the launch of the A-I-W RADEON 9700 Pro, the Theater 200 does the job today. ATI has released the successor to the 200 in the form of the Theater 550, but for the U.S. market, at least there isn't need for replacement just yet. The European market will get A-I-W X1800XLs with HDTV support, but the U.S market doesn't have that capability as of yet.

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