Author: Ben Sun · 08-27-2008
ATI has been at the forefront of multimedia applications for their video cards for years. The first “All-In-Wonder” video card was released way back in 1996 with the ability to play TV on the PC. Since then ATI has released many AIW products until the release of the AIW X1900 their last AIW card in 2006. The gap of two years has seen the release of many video chip families including the HD2xxx, HD3xxx and the HD4xxx families of video cards.
One of the problems with designing their AIW line of VGA cards is that they are generally six months behind the family launch, so that a new chip is released before the AIW would normally be ready to release. This is one of the reasons why ATI has stayed out of the AIW release for the last two years as no less than three different chip families have been released since the X1900 and was four generations ago, if you count the X1950XTX cards. ATI announced the AIW HD on June 26 and today that is the card on the test bench for us to see how well it works and why it’s a viable product.
The ATI/AMD All-In-Wonder HD is based upon ATI’s Radeon HD 3650 mid-range graphics card that was released last year. Based upon TSMC’s 55nm process, with a total of 378 million transistors, the HD 3650 is the middle brother of the HD3xxx family of cards which includes the HD3870, the HD3650 and the HD 3450. Codenamed the RV635, the HD 3650 on the card is clocked at 725MHz for the core, 600MHz for the memory which is GDDR2 and has a 128-bit memory interface.
The total memory bandwidth available on the card is 19.2GB/second which is found by multiplying the memory clock speed by the memory bus interface and dividing it by 8 to change bits into bytes. The internal memory bandwidth of the A-I-W card is doubled due to the memory ring bus which makes the memory bus internally of 256-bit. The A-I-W HD has a fill rate of Key features of the HD 3650 include support for Microsoft’s DirectX 10.1 API which supports improved image quality features and better support for Global Illumination. The HD 3650 supports up to up 8x MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing), Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing which allows the effective anti-aliasing to go up to 24x, and 16x AF. But the key features of the HD 3650 have been covered in many of my reviews so I’ll cover the new features of the AIW HD card.
ATI has used their Unified Video Decoder to play back and decode DVD movies, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies with less stress on the CPU by doing the decoding on the graphics card. UVD2 supports H.264/AVC and VC1 formats meaning that all of the High Definition Content is supported by the UVD2. One benefit of the A-I-W HD is the inclusion of the Theater 650 chip which was introduced with the HDTV Wonder a couple of years ago. One thing that has really hit home recently is the emergence of the Green initiative to save the environment by reducing energy consumption and emissions. The HD 3650 has ATI’s PowerPlay technology which monitors GPU activity and adjusts clock speeds to user needs. In 2D for example, the HD 3650 will have clock throttling, voltage switching and Dynamic clock gating to save energy when not needed.
Digital TV will take over the place of analog TV in February of the year 2009. The transition means that many older TV sets will require a converter box to display television shows after that transition date or may not work at all. The AIW HD card is designed to allow the user to watch the Digital signals from many sources including analog (NTSC), digital/HDTV (ATSC) and unencrypted digital cable (ClearQAM) with time-shifting functionality. Analog TV is disappearing on February of 2009, so everything will be digital. One thing to note is that cable companies like Time Warner Cable encrypt a lot of their channels so that only the basic cable package can be viewed with ClearQAM due to the fact that the cable companies will want to sell their CableCards and packages beyond the basic one. Mileage may vary and some cable companies allow wider access to stations than others. There is still a lot of grey area as to how well the reception will be with your local cable company, and what channels will be available to you to view.
source : www.motherboards.org
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