Jetway Radeon HD 2900 XT Crossfire review

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Page 4 - Avivo HD

Avivo HD technology

AMD has tagged HD to the product name to designate the entire lineups Avivo HD technology, for a good reason. One of the bigger features of the product is Avivo HD.

I've been preaching for a while now, that 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 really started last year already and with the help of Blu-ray and HD-DVD it's coming in faster and quite frankly, thank God for that, as watching content in HD is simply fantastically breathtaking.

The HDTV market continues to heat up, and who has not heard about terms like HD Ready? Let's run through some terms. HDTV stands for High Definition Television, the current image standard is know as Standard Definition. The high definition format uses upto 1080 lines to make up the picture you see on your TV compared to 576 for the current standard, HD will also be broadcasted in widescreen 16:9 format rather than the conventional 4:3 format. This will make for a truly cinematic experience.

Very blunt: HD = More lines = more pixels = better picture quality

In simple terms the image you will see with HD will have vastly improved image detail and color reproduction.

HDMI means High-Definition Multimedia Interface. It is a new kind of digital audio and video connector that will replace all connectors currently used by DVD players, TV sets and video monitors. The big idea here is that we should all use a single cable instead of several cables when connecting your DVD player to your TV set, for example. Interesting fact: HDMI is similar to DVI with three exceptions; HDMI is a much smaller connector (it pretty much looks like an USB connector), HDMI utilizes copy protection called HDCP (high definition copy protection) and finally; HDMI carries multi channel digital audio. HDMI, like DVI, is ALL-digital therefore picture quality is perfect from source to display.

HDMI also implements a copy-protection mechanism called HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection). First off ... From now on, all series 2000 cards are HDCP compatible as the much needed crypto chip is embedded into the core logic of the card. Why the need for it? Well, with Vista when you want to playback HDCP content (movies) on your monitor, the resolution could be dumbed down or even worse if your monitor, content and graphics card do not have a HDCP (content protection) handshake.

Mind you, that if you like to playback media files with a HDCP ready graphics card, you'll also need a HDCP compatible monitor.

So, a HD Ready television will have either a DVI (Digital Video Interface) or HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface). Both connections provide exceptional quality. HDMI is often referred to as the digital SCART cable as it also provides audio. DVI supplies picture only, separate cables are needed for audio. Both HDMI and DVI support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) which will be a requirement for protected content.

How does this relate to the series HD 2000 Radeon graphics cards? In more ways than you think, just look at the latest trend of HTPCs, Home Theater PCs. Things like Media Center PCs. It's exactly these kinds of things I am talking about. This is the future of media playback and the PC is going to play a very important role in that.

So what are the key advantages of Avivo HD technology? In my opinion two key factors are a big advantage. To offload the CPU by allowing the GPU to take over a huge sum of the workload. HDTV decoding through a TS (Transport Stream) file, for example, can be very demanding for a CPU. These media files can peak to 20 Mbit/sec easily as HDTV streams offer high-resolution playback in 1280x720p or even 1920x1080p without framedrops and image quality loss. In fact, the cards can actually enhance image quality.

By offloading that big task for the bigger part of the graphics core, you give the CPU way more headroom to do other things, which actually makes your PC run normal. The combination of these factors offer you stutter-free high quality and high resolution media playback. All standard HDTV resolutions are of course supported, among them the obvious 480p, 720p and 1080i modes and now also 1080p (P=Progressive and I=Interlaced).

The new HD 2000 series will also offer HD noise reduction, which is a great feature with older converted films. And this is where we land at Image Quality. Avivo HD can offer a large amount of options that'll increase the IQ of playback. This can be managed with a wide variety of options. Obviously AMD has some interesting filters available in the Avivo HD suite, like advanced de-interlacing; which can greatly improve image quality while playing back that DVD, MPEG2 or TS file (just some examples). Aside from that, things like colour corrections should not be forgotten. All major media streams are supported by AMD with Avivo HD. And yes, High Definition H.264 acceleration, which will become a big, new and preferred standard, is also supported.

AMDs UVD expands on the previous generations AVIVO implementation to include hardware bit stream processing and entropy decode functions. Hardware acceleration of frequency transform, pixel prediction and deblocking functions remain supported, as with the first generation AVIVO processing. AMDs Advanced Video Processor, or AVP, has also made the cut for low power video processing.

Update 23rd May 2006

Only recently we found out that the Radeon HD 2900 XT does not  support UVD, while the cheaper HD 2400 and 2600 cards will. Quite a bummer yet loads of bitstream-processing will and can be handled by both the CPU and GPU together now.

ATI on UVD with the HD 2900 XT:

ATI: HD 2900 does not have UVD; it'll be paried with HD video capable CPU's. The drivers used in this test don't yet have decode acceleration enabled either, first revision of that comes with 8.38

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT review- Copyright Guru3D 2007
Let's have a peek. This is an 18 Mbit/s HD MPEG2 file taken from a HD broadcast.

Lousy photos, sorry about that, but of course we gave it a try. We loaded up the all new PowerDVD and started up some High-definition content. We display the content back on a 2560x1600 pixels wide 30"screen. Have a closer look at CPU usage; that's right 10-15%.  Actually not bad. Now let's make it more sifficult:

H.264 1080P HD Decoding

Here we are decoding Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest - This is a 1080p MP4 / AVC. This is a H.264 endcoded file; while it has a much lower bitrate, the decoding process on the GPU would be 4x more stringent.

Results at rougly 25% CPU load; reasonable. I look forward to the new drivers and we'll investigate on the decoding process and compatibility in the near future.

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