ATi's All In Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro

FlippedBit writes "ATi has taken the wraps off their latest Swiss Army Knife 3D Graphics Card with TV Tuner and Remote Control capabilities, that rival most discrete solutions. The All In Wonder Radeon 9700Pro packs a ton of A/V features and is driven by their new R300 VPU. HotHardware has a look at this new beast and all its bells and whistles, right here."

Comments

So where's the Mac version?

[Dark Paladin]

I hate to sound like a whiner, but this card would be perfect on my Mac. Between my game reviews, this would do it all - render by OS X games great, for my console reviews I could plug the svideo cables in for screenshot captures right to Quicktime/iMovie video.

At the moment I ue a Formac Tevion, which works well through the Firewire, but as someone who believes that less hardware is better, ATI should really think about making a Mac version of this card. I can't imagine it would be all that hard - the hardware is AGP on both platforms, so it would just be someone at ATI writing some OS X drivers for this device.

Not sure if anyone else cares about this, but I've been annoyed by ATI's lack of good video capture tools on the Mac since - well, since I started using Mac's in February of this year.

Video Recorder

[atrus]

I was struck by this phrase from the review:

Should you be interested in a particular word or phrase from a captured show, you can search the close captioned database and playback will begin at the section of the stream.

That feature makes my day :) Kudos to ATI for adding something useful to the video recorder program.

Re:Looks interesting

[Accipiter]

That's too bad, because I was looking for another 3D card to buy for my system.

After asking around what options there were for good 3D support under Linux, I bought an nVidia GeForce 4. Problem is, I'm having some severe issues with it. Running anything OpenGL that has some intense rendering (Return to Castle Wolfenstein, for instance) will do one of two things: 1) cause X to lock up, flashing Scroll Lock and Caps Lock at me once every second, or 2) spontaneously reset my machine. Obviously, this is not a good thing, and I'm actually quite disappointed.

It appears to be something deeper than a driver issue, though, as I get RTCW to crash under Windows in the exact same manner, and under the exact same conditions as under Linux. (Windows bluescreens, while X locks up.) I've tried Quake3, RTCW, and other simple OpenGL apps (glxgears, fsv, etc.), and all cause my machine to shit itself.

It's not a problem with the card, either, as I bought two separate GeForce4 cards from two different manufacturers, and both had the exact same issues. Plus, my system doesn't contain any backwoods generic parts; Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard, PIII Processor.

I just don't get it. It's a shame, too, because my previous card (3dfx Voodoo3) was a pain in the ass to get working with 3D in Linux. I e-mailed nVidia and posted a message to their forums, both of which have gotten me no replies.

I can't recommend nVidia at this time, and I've heard worse things about ATI's Linux support. Since Linux is my primary OS (I only installed Windows to test out the above scenario), I honestly don't know what to do.

it rivals nothing...

[Lumpy]

that rival most discrete solutions
Until they come out with HARDWARE MPEG encode and decode on the card it rivals nothing.

My DV500 video capture card hardware encodes so my processor doesnt have to waste time doing it. My Hollywood+ and my DV500 card both hardware decode. (Cat a mpeg stream to the hollywood+ card and magically that mpeg 1 or 2 file is displayed.. the newer Hollywood cards do Divix (mpeg4) on the card. while the DV500 will do mpegs 1&2 DV and most AVI file types (Not mpeg4 without a firmware change)

coupled with my Geforce3 I dont see it rivaling anything. ATI's offering is still just a toy, A video card with some neato-things added that are useless for any professional uses (if you want professional results.. I dont see anyone desiring to buy a capture device for anything onther than editing... except PVR.. and if their PVR software that comes with the card is anything like what they send with the last iteration of the all in wonder... it will fail again.