ATI Avivo new-generation graphics processor targets digital-home PCs
The long-running neck-and-neck race between graphics-card specialists ATI and Nvidia could turn into a procession for the foreseeable future – with ATI way out ahead.
The Canadian company today unveils a 10-bit-per-colour graphics-processor architecture – Avivo – that is set to be used in all of its next-generation graphics-card offerings, starting at the high end in the next few weeks and trickling down thereafter.
On paper, Avivo-based graphics cards will outperform today's mass-market products in virtually every area. Their claimed true-to-life picture quality will appeal greatly to the ever increasing number of digital home PC users who view stills or video on their computers – as well as to those who edit images and footage and to professionals in the graphics and video-creation arenas.
The two standout advantages of Avivo are the much increased colour depth that it can display and the hardware assistance that it gives to the playback of a wide range of video footage. That assistance relieves the burden on the PC's CPU of playing MPEG-2 and, more importantly, of more processor-intensive up-and-coming high-definition formats. The much-improved HD playback capabilities can largely be credited to the inclusion of the same ATI Xilleon technology that already dominates the manufacture of processing chips for high-definition TV sets.
For video editors or those who simply want to capture video, Avivo-based products will be available with hardware-assisted encoding – again including MPEG-2 and key HD formats - some paired with digital TV tuners able to receive and record high-definition and standard-definition broadcasts - and all, in theory, suitable for playing the new rival high-definition DVD formats, HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
Computers running Avivo-based graphics cards or GPUs will offer colour better than most people's eyesight can resolve – though for best effect will require monitors able to display those extra colours, something that few of today's models can do.
Avivo-equipped PCs should be able to play back video without any dropped frames, even if the footage is high definition and the PC has a relatively puny CPU. Watching videos in HD formats such as H.264 and Windows Media HD - and the much-less-processor-intensive DivX HD - could become a pleasure, rather than a trial of patience.
Like Nvidia and other direct rivals, ATI's mass-market products currently use Truecolor GPUs offering eight-bit-per-colour for a total of 16.7 million (16,777,216) mixed colours. With Avivo's 10-bits-per-colour, though, the number increases 64-fold, to over 1 billion - 1,073,741,824 to be precise. And, since there are two sets of 10-bit processing paths, the same high quality can be output on a second screen simultaneously – whether a monitor or an HD ready TV set.
Ten-bit colour exceeds the limit that human vision can normally resolve so can be seen as an end-point beyond which graphics-card makers won't need to go in the quest for true-to-life colour rendition. But it also goes beyond the eight-bit-per-colour (16.7 million) capabilities of most of today's monitors – LCD and CRT.
If Avivo catches on, there ought to be a big boost in demand for more capable monitors. However, ATI says that a significant quality difference will be clearly visible if outputting from Avivo to eight-bit-per-colour monitors, thanks to some other clever trickery it builds in.
Significantly, ATI claims the same will be true even with the sort of cheap, six-bit-per-colour displays frequently used on inexpensive laptop PCs. So, logically, laptop makers should be falling over themselves to adopt Avivo, since it will enable them to significantly boost display quality without much increase in build costs.
That should enable ATI not only to wrest laptop-GPU market-share away from Nvidia – the two currently have about 25 per cent each – but also to start pulling sales from Intel, which owns most of the rest of market with GPUs integrated along with other laptop chippery, such as for WiFi functionality.
For more about the intriguing possibilities opened up by Avivo, check out HEXUS's technical overview, read ATI's press release, take a browse of ATI's (rather Flash-heavy) Avivo pages and keep an eye on our front page. Oh, and feel free to comment in this thread in HEXUS's new digital-home forum area, HEXUS.lifestyle.
