Radeon X1650 XT & X1950 Pro & Crossfire

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Crossfire

Most of you know this, but the previous generation products except the X1950 Pro and the low-end segment had to use the dreaded Y-Cable to be able to run Crossfire. Ever since Catalyst 6.5 drivers you'll be able to hook up similar Radeon X1000 series graphics cards from the low and mid-range segment up-to the X1600 without the need for a master card AND you do not need the Y-Cable. Just plug these cards preferably into a (2x) x16 PCI-Express lane mainboard and it should work. It however was not optimal as you'd be REALLY pushing the PCI-Express bus.

The old situation (bad bad ATI)

The high-end series required that Y-cable (great name because often I asked "Why" ...  Why is that cable needed ?) ATi used it to composite images between the two cards. ATI is producing a digital image from the DVI output of the slave card and then sends it to the large connector (DMS-59) on the master board. The master board will, on its terms, prepare its image and then send off both to a compositing engine that is processed on the master board. The master card is responsible for "fusion" of the images between the two boards and that can be done in a number of varieties. So that is why you needed a primary card, you have two cards rendering images and then there's is a compositing engine need which is located on the master card.

Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.comSoftware wise this is pretty much all you need to do to enable Crossfire.

The new situation (ATI good ATI good)

ATI basically natively incorporated the compositing engine that was located on the CrossFire Master card right into the GPU die. So to run X1650 XT and X1950 Pro cards in a CrossFire configuration, all you have to do is connect them via a pair of ribbon cables, very similar to NVIDIA's SLI bridge. These cables for the time being will actually be bundled with the video cards and not the motherboards, because there are a plethora of Intel 975 and P965 boards already available that are CrossFire compatible, that don't ship with the appropriate connector cables.

So ATI/AMD will be including that CrossFire connector with each card moving forward from now on. In this review we are checking out two of these new cards from ATI in both Crossfire and single card configurations as well.

On the below photo you can see the new CrossFire connector.

Crossfire Radeon X1650 XT and X1950 Pro review - Copyright Guru3D.com 2006

Dude, you just said "ooh" didn't you ?

 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 clock on one of the two images below. 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 real-time. 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 not-so-old Catalyst beta 6.5 drivers we had 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.

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To give you an idea how intensely big one frame of 1920x1080 is with a framerate of 24 frames per second. Click on a the two example images above. Load them up, and realize that your graphics card is displaying that kind of content 24 times per second, while enhancing them in real-time.

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