ATI Radeon 64MB DDR

Video Options

In addition to the powerful Charisma engine, some of the Rage6C's 30 million transistors go to the hardware IDCT and HDTV support. IDCT, inverse discrete cosine transform, is one aspect of software DVD playback that is extremely hardware intensive. By including hardware IDCT support in the core, ATI has been able to accelerate DVD playback performance significantly compared to other pure software based DVD decoding methods. This one aspect of ATI cards have kept some users sticking with their ATI cards through the bad and the good.

HDTV support is another aspect of the core that ATI seems excited about. By having full HDTV support in the core, the possibilities are limitless for what ATI can do with an All in Wonder based Radeon card. Rather than spending a few thousand of dollars to get an HDTV ready TV, ATI is suggesting that you experiment in some HDTV viewing right from your computer monitor. In addition, this HDTV signal could then, in theory, be passed directly to the card's S-Video output, making it possible to view HDTV signals on a normal TV without a conversion box. Keep in mind, however, that you are still limited by the S-Video resolution, meaning that it still will not look as good as a true HDTV signal.

As mentioned before, the Radeon's video input and output are controlled by the Rage Theater chip. This is the same chip that was found on the Rage Fury Pro (Rage 128 Pro). Below is an except from that review.

The card itself supports capturing in raw (uncompressed) YUV9, ATI VCR 1.0, ATI VCR 2.0, MPEG-1, or MPEG-2 video formats. The capture format that should be used varies depending on the intended use of the video and how much CPU power is available. Everyone can, of course, play raw uncompressed video, but the file sizes are simply unreasonable. In all cases, a hard drive capable of keeping up with the data being written is necessary. Raw video does require quite a bit of sustained hard drive performance.

The VCR 1.0 and 2.0 formats are proprietary ATI formats, but may be playable on other systems using AVI extensions. However, it is difficult (ie not possible with most software, including ATI's) to edit MPEG-1 or 2 video streams, making the VCR formats still very useful. According to ATI, this may change as MPEG formats increase in popularity. For distribution purposes, the final edited video can be saved in either of the two MPEG formats.

The best format for distributing video is most likely MPEG-1 since it is widely accepted and almost everyone has the appropriate CODEC for playback (it is now included in Microsoft's Windows Media Player). MPEG-1 provides approximately VHS level quality and is used in Video-CD's. The compression level is better than the ATI VCR formats and is more universally accepted. MPEG-2 is gaining popularity and will play using just about any software DVD player since DVD is just MPEG-2 video. Compression and quality levels are higher than that of MPEG-1, but of course require the most CPU power. Of course, the available formats are heavily dependent on what CPU is in use.