H.264/Conclusion

H.264 Acceleration

The Catalyst 5.13 drivers also bring H.264 acceleration as well as the AVIVO Video Converter. This means that you'll be able to watch those high-definition 1080p trailers from Quicktime with an X1800XL with ease. At the moment, we've only had time to do some limited tests with the X1800XL, but it seems like H.264 acceleration works very well. We'll have to spend some more time in January looking at H.264 decode performance with a wider range of CPUs – the dual Opterons I've been using obviously is an atypically powerful configuration.

Conclusion

Catalyst 5.13 represents the greatest leap in video quality technology for ATI since the original Mach64-VT. It brings sophisticated diagonal filtering, basic noise reduction, and the ability to detect unusual cadences. ATI marketing told us about "video dominATIon" and we have to agree that Catalyst 5.13 brings ATI to the top of the PC video world.

One of the best features of the Catalyst 5.13 is that the software is a free upgrade. As long as you have DVD software that supports DXVA, the AVIVO video processing will work. Owners of Built by ATI cards obviously have access to ATI's Multimedia Center as well. In comparison, PureVideo has never been free. It starts off at $20 for the "bronze" edition with basic SPDIF out support or 2 channel audio, $30 for the gold version with 5.1 analog out, and $50 for the platinum version with DTS support. When price shopping for a new GPU, if you're going with NVIDIA you need to factor in the extra $20 that you wouldn't have to with a built-by-ATI card. Although (or because?) NVIDIA PureVideo cannot detect the unusual cadences, its 3:2 algorithm is faster and is able to lock-onto cadences such as some of the anime test clips. ATI believes that NVIDIA PureVideo is faster because the PureVideo MPEG-2 decoder is able to provide more information to the GPU. Still, we'd certainly prefer that PureVideo be free for NVIDIA owners, at least for the GeForce 7 series or that NVIDIA could offer a free DXVA-only video processing solution like ATI.

Ten days ago, ATI had the worst video quality on the PC. With this new driver, ATI has jumped to the top of the class and then built a nice lead. For Hollywood films, ATI edges out NVIDIA's PureVideo. Although the cadence detection is faster with NVIDIA, ATI has noise reduction will improve the quality of films once the cadence is locked on. In other words, for most Hollywood films, ATI will look better for the 2 hours whereas NVIDIA might look better for the few seconds after a bad-edit, if such a bad edit exists. When it comes to processing interlaced video, ATI now surpasses anything that we've seen on the PC with the best implementation of diagonal filtering we’ve seen yet. When it comes to unusual cadence detection, ATI AVIVO has no peer in its price range.

There's still room for improvement though. Although ATI and NVIDIA apply a region-based motion-adaptive deinterlacing algorithm to high definition sources, they do not seem to reliably detect the 3:2 cadence in high-definition. Neither ATI nor NVIDIA have the ability to handle mixed film/video content with the same skill that some dedicated scalers can. Neither ATI nor NVIDIA have advanced detail enhancement or advanced noise reduction algorithms that can take picture quality another step forward. Even so, with Catalyst 5.13, ATI is making a serious challenge toward the dedicated video processors that cost $3000+ and they're doing it as a free upgrade. With a fully programmable architecture, there is also room for ATI to grow. Companies like Faroudja, Silicon Optix, and Gennum should take notice at this new competitor to the market.

The video engineers at ATI deserve a big holiday bonus. They've made a big leap in performance and will make Catalyst 5.13 free for download on December 22nd. Perhaps the greatest benefit of AVIVO technology is that for most of FiringSquad's readers, it's an added bonus. Most people aren't buying the X1800XL for video performance alone – they're buying for it for the flagship gaming performance.

So what does the future bring? Well, most of what I said 10 days ago still applies. XGI still offers a nice product for $50. NVIDIA's PureVideo is just as good today as it was 10 days ago, but ATI has tripled their deinterlacing performance in those 10 days. NVIDIA must now play catch up with ATI. What about ATI? Well, it turns out that this level of deinterlacing performance was planned from the get go with the X1K family of GPUs. Now that these drivers are about to be released, their engineers are working on enabling the next set of technologies for AVIVO to bring even more functionality and quality. We can’t wait until 2006!

Editors Note: The driver we tested for this article is the same driver ATI will be releasing next week, only the final driver will add WHQL-certification. ATI is working with Microsoft on WHQL-certification as we speak, with an ETA of 12/21.