ATI’s Radeon 9700 (R300) – Crowning the New King

Video through the 3D Pipeline

A very impressive feature that the R300 supports is the ability to insert a video stream into the 3D pipeline instead of just at the DAC level. Not only will this remove the need to use overlay to playback a video stream but it also enables the display of multiple simultaneous video streams.

Just like the RV250, FULLSTREAM is supported; to quote from our Radeon 9000 Pro Review:

(a) FULLSTREAM disabled, (b) FULLSTREAM enabled

“The ability to run pixel shader programs on video streams is promising, and ATI’s FULLSTREAM technology is one such implementation. With appropriate software support (currently only through RealPlayer), FULLSTREAM can smooth out the blocky compression artifacts that are normally seen in low bandwidth video. The end result is that the video stream is much less blocky but much more blurry.”

We’ll definitely be hearing more about the video features of the R300 and ATI’s new Rage Theater chip this fall when ATI releases a R300 version of the All-in-Wonder Radeon.