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High Dynamic Range (HDR)
ATI recently focused extremely hard on HDR, just like NVIDIA did. They put a lot of money into their technology to support HDR in the best possible way. And they should as it just is a fantastic effect that brings so much more to the your gameplay experience. HDR is something you all know from games like Far Cry, extremely bright lighting that brings a really cool cinematic effect to gaming. This effect is becoming extraordinarily popular and the difference is obvious. HDR means High Dynamic Range. HDR facilitates the use of color values way beyond the normal range of the color palette in an effort to produce a more extreme form of lighting rendering. Typically this trick is used to contrast really dark scenery. Extreme sunlight, over-saturation or over exposure is a good example of what exactly is possible. The most simple way to describe it would be controlling the amount of light used present in a certain position in a 3D scene. HDR is already present in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Far Cry, Oblivion, Half Life 2: Lost Coast, Episode One, Serious Sam2, 3DMark06 and will be available in Unreal 3 to name a few titles.
One last thing about HDR; ATI's HDR resolution can manage Antialiasing with HDR enabled, some games need to be patched though. And you might want to check our download section for an unofficial patch. As you know HDR together with AA enabled always has been an issue, no longer.
You can enable HDR and up to 6xAA simultaneously. This is hurting NVIDIA bigtime. NVIDIA's cards can do HDR through shaders, yet it's not at all supported well by software developers. It is likely to hard and thus costly to implement.
Obviously ATI has a far better AA+HDR solution at hand.
AVIVO (Advanced Video in and Out)
Ever since the release of last years Catalyst 5.13 driver some stuff has changed for the better, media wise. As we all know and as I've been preaching for a while now we see the living room entertainment coming to the PC more and more in a very fast fashion. One of the most popular things we've noticed here in Europe has to be HDTV and everything related to it. The trend started last year and hey, even yours truly bought a HDTV recently, and I'm a technology trend setter! It's coming fast and quite frankly, thank God for that as watching content in HD is simply fantastic. So how does that relate to graphics cards? In more ways than you think, just look at the latest trend of HTPCs (Home Theater PCs). Things like Media Center PCs here and there? Do you get where I'm going with this?
Yes exactly this kind of thing is what I am talking about. This is the future of media playback and the PC is going to play a very important role in that. Since it's a PC you probably want a graphics card in there that can support all the cool and extensive features. So media playback and decoding is a process that can, is and will be moved towards the graphics card. Both NVIDIA and ATI already had excellent implementations of it. ATI just took it onto a next level though. With exactly this kind of stuff in mind they introduced the new AVIVO feature.
Avivo features according to the ATI website:
- Supports hardware MPEG-2 compression, hardware assisted decode of MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1 video codecs, and advanced display upscaling
- 64 times the number of colors currently available in current PCs; higher color fidelity with 10-bit processing throughout Avivo´s display engine
- Resolutions, such as 2560x1600 or higher, on the latest digital displays using dual-link DVI, as well as high color depth support over DVI
- Advanced up or down resolution scaling on any flat panel display using ATI´s solutions
- Video capture with features like 3D comb filtering, front-end video scaling, and hardware MPEG video compression
- Hardware noise reduction and 12-bit analog-to-digital conversion
- Supports standard TV, HDTV, video input and all PC displays via digital (DVI, HDMI) and analog (VGA, Component, S-Video, composite) ports
Avivo will be an integral component in all of ATI's upcoming desktop, mobile, chipset, workstation and software products. As stated Media Center PC's are getting really popular. TV is going digital and HD/HD2(?) Blu-ray and HD-DVD are coming. Digital photography is everywhere. AVIVO is a video and display platform that achieves better video quality. AVIVO will be integral in all future ATI products. Smooth vivid playback. Flawless playback for both SD and HD television that's what this stuff is intended for from a decoding point of view. With two dual link DVI ports which are supported on the entire X1000 range two High definition screens can be connected.
It's almost suffice to say that you can have HDTV output digital over the DVI both analog and digital but also (YPrPb component), as well as S-Video and Composite (which of course can't do HD signals). The product series has full support up-to 1080P H.264 hardware Accelerated decoding and mark my words H.264 is the next standard that can and probably will replace MPEG4. I've seen it, I've tested it and it is looking brilliant with far less bandwidth.
If you like to have a slight idea how big an 1080i/p HD image actually is just click this example image. Did you load it ? Make sure you enlarge it to full screen. This is just one frame, the Radeon X1000 series cards will have to (and can) decode images like these in realtime. The HQV benchmark - behind the scenes here in the Guru3D caves we are compiling data for a way of "measuring" image quality of graphics cards in terms of decoding. HQV is a professional way of testing and awarding scores to different types of playback. In combination with the new Catalyst beta 6.5 drivers we have available the score went sky-high as we measured a perfect 130 performance score at 128, which makes AVIVO currently the best possible solution to playback quality rich high definition and "standard" definition media files.
