Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 review - Watching DVD & Dual Display

Any Radeon has to offer. Within any Radeon chip, the video immersion engine provides integrated iDCT and Motion Compensation together with adaptive de-interlacing for outstanding DVD and video quality.

Watching DVD - All  Radeon products provide both hardware motion compensation and iDCT for the highest performance DVD/video playback. With the hardware DVD playback capabilities of the Radeon, the user will receive the high performance and quality while maintaining a low CPU utilization. ATI's Video Immersion technology integrates digital video features, including advanced adaptive de-interlacing algorithms for high video quality.

ATi's DVD/Movie playback simply is awesome. Look at the images below, JPEG compression makes them a tad fuzzy though.

Scene from Spiderman the Movie taken with a Radeon 9700

Dual Display - A new trend that was introduced a lot last year is multiple displays. Much like Matrox and recent NVIDIA products the Radeon 9700 architecture includes technologies that allow dual independent displays. It contains two integrated RAMDAC, support for TV Output, and an integrated TMDS transmitter that allows for support of digital flat panel monitors.

The benefit to the flexible display engine of the Radeon is that it is capable of supporting many different combinations of CRT monitors, digital flat panel monitors, and television displays simultaneously. The graphic card includes the following connectors: 15-pin VGA, 24-pin DVI-I, and s-video. Furthermore, a DVI-I to VGA adapter is included to allow for the connection of a second CRT monitor through the DVI-I connector. I have chosen for a dual-display setup a long time ago. While doing my editorial work for this site I find it extremely convenient to have the ability of an extra screen. It makes my work a lot easier and faster. Dual display gaming is yet another key advantage for the Radeon however not commonly used at all.

In addition to Dual Display the Radeon 9700 comes with HydraVision. This is Multiple Monitor Management Software complements the flexible display engine of the Radeon by providing a flexible and user-friendly interface for multiple monitor environments.  HydraVision software has been tested with over 200 applications and is customized to work in intuitive ways for the end-user. For example, you could use a powerpoint presentation in edit mode (left) while the presentation is in slide show mode in full screen on the secondary display (right).

Multiple displays, I love em ;)