Thoughts
The nailing of deinterlacing and image quality improvements to SD interlaced video are the most significant part of this Avivo update. Available on the 22nd of December 2005 as part of CATALYST 5.13, across all Radeon X1000-series graphics boards, those products are now best-in-class, by quite some margin, SD video processors.The availability of a H.264 ASP and AVC decoder for X1K boards via Cyberlink is also a significant step towards completing the promised Avivo feature set, and it'll be a free download from Cyberlink when it's finally released in the near future. With ATI railing on NVIDIA for their pay-for PureVideo DVD decoder for quite some time, that's more than welcome.
We'd also have liked ATI to have disclosed more fully that their X1K SKUs wouldn't have across-the-board equivalency for HD decode, after we asked Godfrey, "I take it performance of the assist scales with GPU engine clock? If so, is it right to assume lower performance on the slowest RV515 hardware, but performance that's still better than any other transcode or encode assist on other competing products?", back in October where he commented that they were only talking about R520 just then. That X1300 isn't as capable as X1600 or X1800 at decoding HD video is rather disappointing, although somewhat expected.
Finally, the Video Convertor shows that Cobra, which is about to be licensed to other convertor tool vendors, has a frightening turn of speed. It's still unclear as to how ATI intend to distribute the application, or what the timetable for improvements is (since it sucks right now), but it shows distinct promise. Its current limitations make it fairly useless for any serious H.264 work, although the quality of output is passable for the more SD-led formats, so we hope to see that improve in the future. HEXUS wish we had the time to delve deeper into the guts of Cobra this time, since it's a fascinating piece of software from a pure engineering perspective.
So not quite the transcoding panacea some would like to have you think, but a huge step in the right direction in terms of speed. I have the guilty pleasure (PD would say perversion) of spending my own spare time optimising a H.264 toolchain for the Athlon 64 basic architecture, under 64-bit Windows, and even my efforts and those of vastly better programmers and capable enthusiasts can't get close to ATI's efforts in terms of speed, when generating H.264 video. And that format really is the one to focus on going forward, for all kinds of reasons.
So to recap, CATALYST 5.13 is an absolute must have driver for X1K owners just before Christmas this year. It gives the hardware the promised SD video processing ability ATI talked about and we went over technically in our Avivo piece before X1K launched. H.264 decode and transcode we'll keep a close eye on in early 2006, since that's when the components for that on X1K will start to become available, but things are definitely promising on that front.
The Avivo jigsaw continues to be assembled.
