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By William Van Winkle |
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Just released last month, AMD’s new ATI TV Wonder 650 series is one of the best tuner plays in the channel. The Theater 650 Pro chip on which the series is based embodies all of ATI’s latest advances in video signal capture and encoding, most notably with MPEG-2 encoding, signal noise reduction, and comb filtering. (Comb filtering is the decoding process step that separates the luminance and chrominance components of the digital video signal.) As it did for years with the All-in-Wonder card series, AMD/ATI still bundles an excellent set of tools with its tuner products, spanning everything from placeshifting to an Electronic Programming Guide to capture/conversion into WMV9, DivX, and H.264. The base-level SKU is the TV Wonder 650 ($129), a single hybrid tuner on a PCI format. This card offers both Clear QAM tuning as well as the option of remote PVR support, allowing the user to manage recordings from across the Internet. Both features are also included on the TV Wonder 650 Combo (also $129), which not only integrates two tuners but switches to a x1 PCI Express slot. Why would you buy the plain 650 for anything but a legacy system upgrade if the pricing is the same, you ask? Beats us. Finally, there’s the other TV Wonder 650 USB, functionally identical to the PCIe card, only this model is external and costs $20 more.
Of course, there are plenty of digital HDTV tuners on the market, including products from well-known names like Hauppauge, AVerMedia, and Diamond Multimedia. While the pricing of some units may make these look like commodity items, they’re not. Test them side by side and you’ll find a significant delta in image and component quality, never mind feature breadth. Whether it’s for consumers watching a little “Late Night” in bed before nodding off or execs wanting a running stream of CNBC on their desktops, we expect digital TV tuners to become a regular staple of mainstream systems. Strategically, it will pay to establish yourself as a provider of high-quality options now rather than when bigger vendors have saturated the market with inferior or overpriced product. “High-def TV, and TV on the PC as a whole, is going to become pervasive in 2008,” says AMD’s Matt Kreiner. “The reason for that is the cost structure and pricing for TV tuners will get to the point where it drives differentiation. There’s HD in every single TV product that we have in design or are shipping now. It’ll soon be a competitive disadvantage for system builders who do not integrate TV tuners in their PCs.” As a final note on the DTV topic, be aware that FCC requirements state that all new TV devices sold after March 1, 2007, must be capable of receiving digital broadcast signals. Exceptions must be clearly tagged as such with a Consumer Alert label. In mid-October, Radio Shack was fined $16,000 for selling analog units without this Consumer Alert; supermarket chain Fred Meyer got nailed for $24,000. The FCC fine is $8,000 per offending TV set. This is no doubt why Best Buy pulled all analog TVs from its shelves on October 1. The FCC isn’t messing around in pushing through the industry transition to all-digital broadcasting by February 17, 2009. When it comes to your entertainment-oriented PC sales, you shouldn’t be messing around either. Digital tuning is where it’s at.
THE GPU ELEMENT Thankfully, the GPU is usually not a critical element of the multimedia entertainment experience—-provided we’re not talking about gaming. Instead, we can focus on things like supported features and heat output. About the time you read this, NVIDIA will be launching its G92 chip, AMD will be countering with its RV670, and, from a video handling perspective, we won’t much care. We’ll be more interested in the fact that G92 uses a 65nm fab process versus RV670’s 55nm node and the possible ramifications of that difference on power consumption and heat output. Admittedly, we may find that one or both of these chips packs in new multimedia features we haven’t seen in existing designs, but we’ve had no word from either company that would indicate this prior to launch. So now that we can dispense with all of that speeds-and-feeds business, let’s talk about GPU-based decoding and post-processing support. There are three processing platforms to keep track of: AMD’s Avivo, NVIDIA’s PureVideo, and Intel’s Clear Video Technology. All three are designed to help video playback on PCs look its best.
AVIVO AND AVIVO HD Avivo debuted with the ATI Radeon X1000 series of GPUs and sought to emphasize ATI’s involvement with capture cards by defining the “video pipeline” into five stages. The first two, analog/digital capture and encoding, were handled by a product like the TV Wonder or All-in-Wonder. The latter three stages were decoding, post-processing, and display output, and these were tackled by the graphics card. How Avivo dealt with each of these stages goes well beyond the scope of this article. (See ati.amd.com/technology/Avivo/pdf/Avivo_Whitepaper.pdf and ati.amd.com/technology/avivo/pdf/Avivo_Display_Engine_Whitepaper_v2_final.pdf for a solid tutorial.) Suffice it to say that the results were much more accurate video capture and conversion accompanied by equally impressive color and sharpness enhancements. Also note that Avivo-compliant GPUs sported hardware dedicated to decoding MPEG-2, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 video, thus lightening the load shouldered by the CPU. In fact, when Avivo first debuted, it was all but impossible for a CPU of the time to play high-def H.264 video simply through software decoding. Avivo took over several of the decrypt stages in this work. With the HD 2000 series of GPUs, AMD advances its display platform with Avivo HD. The video pipeline concept remains intact, and the platform’s image processing features have not been majorly overhauled. Instead, AMD has focused on enabling a broader, more modernized video experience. Avivo HD comprises an integrated HDCP encryption key for each DVI or HDMI port, a Theater 200 chip for video input/output functionality, ATI Xilleon circuitry for overscan and underscan correction, the very cool but entirely optional Avivo Video Converter application, and a 5.1 audio controller built into the GPU. This audio controller, when activated by the user plugging an HDMI cable into the video card, supplants the PC’s regular onboard audio. This allows one HDMI cable to carry both the video output and the 5.1 surround audio feed to the TV or amplifier. (If the user lacks an HDMI amp, he can still send video over the HDMI cable and use a SPDIF or analog connection for conventional audio output.) This consolidation of cabling courtesy of an HD 2000-based graphics adapter can be a small but key value-add for system builders targeting home theater environments. Separate from but often seen alongside Avivo HD is AMD’s Unified Video Decoder (UVD). This is an update to the original Avivo’s hardware-based decode acceleration engine and is based on the Xilleon video processor. Support for MPEG-4/DivX now joins the list of assisted formats, but the key takeaway on UVD is that, unlike first-gen Avivo, it offloads nearly the entire job of H.264 and VC-1 decryption from the CPU. Moreover, the UVD engine performs some post-processing jobs, including deinterlacing, scaling, and noise removal. There was some confusion when the HD 2000 family first arrived because the entire group was tagged as being Avivo HD-compliant, but the HD 2900 SKUs lacked hardware-based UVD. (These GPUs could still perform UVD tasks in software.) This was because the HD 2900 was designed on a larger fab process prior to the other models.
The forthcoming RV670 will support hardware UVD. Perhaps even more significantly for system builders, so will IGP motherboards using AMD’s next-gen RS780 chipset. UVD has the ability to perform decoding of 40 Mb/s H.264 streams. This wide bandwidth pipeline not only meets present-day 1080p Blu-ray and HD DVD requirements but will also accommodate future enhancements, such as picture-in-picture. Also take into account that because the GPU is doing so much optimized handling of H.264 decoding, the entire playback process takes far less system-wide power. For notebook users, this will soon mean the ability to watch a full-length blue laser movie on battery power alone—-something that couldn’t be done under first-gen Avivo. As of this writing, the 690G is AMD’s leading IGP chipset with Avivo functionality built in. Mind you, this isn’t Avivo HD. The 690G essentially uses the same core as the Radeon X1250, but this still delivers lots of benefits for standard-def video, not to mention support for VGA, DVI, and HDMI. Plus the 690G supports dual-display output. You can see this on boards such as MSI’s K9AGM2 and Sapphire’s PEAM2RS690MH, both of which boast integrated VGA and HDMI ports. PUREVIDEO Once you’ve covered the basics of Avivo HD, NVDIA’s PureVideo story seems downright repetitive. To be fair, though, NVIDIA did beat ATI to the punch on both its first- and second-generation video platforms. The original PureVideo that arrived with the GeForce 6 family specialized in MPEG-2 and WMV acceleration while offloading some of the H.264 burden and performing several image enhancement tasks. On the off chance you have any left on your shelves, be aware that the GeForce 6100 omitted many of the features found in all other desktop models. Strangely, the GeForce 8400M G is the lone feature dropper of NVIDIA’s mobile GPU line. In general, you’ll find that specific PureVideo feature support varies from GPU to GPU through the entire GeForce 6, 7, and 8 lines, so another way to differentiate yourself is to discover which models have the broadest support (tip: try the 8500, 8600, and mobile 8700 groups) and educate customers on the advantages of your SKUs. For the full break-down, see www.nvidia.com/docs/CP/11036/PureVideo_Product_Comparison.pdf. After PureVideo, some confusion sets in. Second-gen PureVideo 2 arrived this year with the GeForce 8, but PureVideo HD showed up in 2006 with the GeForce 7900. If you were to only glance at NVIDIA’s site, you’d suspect that PureVideo HD was the logical successor to PureVideo, just as Avivo HD succeeded Avivo. The PureVideo HD name applies to both first-gen PureVideo as well as PureVideo 2. PureVideo HD only means that the GPU is certified for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc playback. More specifically, this entails having HDCP encryption for DVI and HDMI displays as well as decoding of 1080p30 VC-1, H.264, or high-def MPEG-2 video streams. As with AMD’s UVD engine, NVIDIA implements updates with PureVideo 2 that offload specific, processing-intensive stages of VC-1 and H.264 decoding. In English, this means that a PureVideo 2-enabled GPU will do a more efficient job of Blu-ray and HD DVD playback and leave more CPU resources available for other system tasks.
CLEAR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY A hasty look at Intel might indicate that the dominant name in integrated graphics—-and thereby all PC graphics-—had fallen way behind the curve on video processing. While ATI and NVIDIA were touting their first-gen platforms, Intel quietly followed with Clear Video Technology for its 945G chipset. This came at a time when the big Viiv platform push was on, and features such as HDMI support, hardware-accelerated deinterlacing and MPEG-2 decoding, software-based VC-1 decoding all sounded pretty cutting edge. Unfortunately, Intel had two problems on its hands at the time: Of all the priorities and tasks Intel had to juggle with Viiv, promoting a jargon-laden technology like Clear Video Technology (CVT) was near the bottom of the list. And because the CVT card fell to the bottom of the deck, Intel never developed any materials to show if or how it had a competitive advantage over ATI or NVIDIA. When the G965 chipset arrived, and with it a significant update to CVT’s quality and support, Intel again prepared to trumpet the technology’s advantages to the world, but this ran into scheduling conflicts with the Santa Rosa (fourth-gen Centrino) launch. Once more, the big platform message was more important than the little video message, and CVT waited restlessly in the back seat.. With the release of the 3 Series chipsets, particularly the G33 and G35, Intel carries CVT forward and continues to make progress with it. Third-generation Clear Video is not on par with second-gen Avivo or PureVideo. However, for many mainstream users it may not have to be. The chief weakness is hardware support for AVC/H.264 1080i and 720p decoding, but not for the 1080p format often used by Blu-ray and HD DVD. For VC-1 and MPEG-2, hardware 1080p support is present and joined by features such as noise reduction, advanced deinterlacing, HDMI output, and improved scaling. In short, the G965, G33, and G35 all deliver a very solid, CVT-boosted video experience from the PC. The only caveat is a present pothole on the 1080p road map.. “We see video as a key new technology emerging for the PC,” says Josh Newman, chipset and graphics marketing manager at Intel. “So our graphics solutions will continue to deliver new capabilities on video. There are a couple new vectors you’ll see a lot of activity on next year and even some this year with products we’re shipping. One of them is Clear Video Technology, which today is all about delivering the highest quality standard definition video you can possibly get on a PC. But also ease of use features, such as TV Wizard, for connecting to various types of CE displays. We’re also investing in being able to decode things like Blu-ray and HD DVD encryption formats.” It’s important to note that all of Intel’s latest integrated graphics cores support Blu-ray and HD DVD playback through software. Some Blu-ray titles, for example, utilize MPEG-2 or VC-1 codecs rather than H.264, and Intel’s chips will handle these just fine. But without full codec support, Intel can’t meet the official logo requirements for those blue laser formats...yet. With Intel going public about its Larrabee discrete graphics plans for the second half of 2008, it’s fairly obvious that the company will need to draw even with its competitors on the video platform front.
And if Intel has CVT updated for Larrabee, it’s a fair guess that the IGP side will benefit too. In fact, the 3 Series already supports Intel’s proprietary Series Digital Video Out (SVDO) technology. Historically, PCI Express-based SVDO was best known for its enablement of ADD2+ and MEC add-in cards. (Now that the 3 Series supports dual independent displays onboard, such cards are becoming less beneficial.) Now, SVDO is the link through which motherboard manufacturers can attach, for instance, an HDMI ASIC with embedded HDCP keys. Also keep an eye out for Intel’s forthcoming adoption of DisplayPort, the new VESA standard approved last year for computer A/V interconnects. “Intel got interested in DisplayPort about a year ago, because we saw a couple things happening,” says Intel chipset and graphics marketing manager Mike Able. “One, we saw HDMI as obviously the CE connector of choice. The challenge we saw with HDMI for the PC going forward, though, was that it’s a standard set by CE companies that are concerned about the 10-foot viewing experience at up to 100-inch screen sizes. When you analyze that, you come to the conclusion that 1080p, or 1920x1080, is the maximum resolution you need. And you want to use the rest of your display bandwidth for things like deeper color and other technologies that will enrich that fixed 1080 resolution. Now, for the PC, we see this emergence of 20- to 30-inch displays, and you’re focused on the 2-foot user experience, where 1920x1080 still isn’t as good as you can get. You want to be able to scale up to 3000x2000 and beyond, because you’re sitting that close to the PC. DisplayPort is what gets you there. DVI runs out of steam in terms of bandwidth. On the mobile side with LVDS, you have to double the number of wires in order to increase the bandwidth going up to the hinge, which is a very difficult design element to deal with. DisplayPort solves the bandwidth problems and is easy to design and integrate.” ...more |
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Copyright © 2007 RAM Magazine. All rights reserved.
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