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ATI Video Processing Upgrade

Posted by Zonk on from the shinier-all-around dept.

An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has a hands-on look at ATI Catalyst 5.13 drivers for the Radeon X1800XL, with a focus on video quality. They say it's the greatest leap in video quality technology for ATI since the original Mach64-VT. They triple their HQV Benchmark DVD scores by adding diagonal filtering, unusual cadence detection, and even noise reduction. On top of the video quality improvements, the new drivers enable ATI's hardware H.264 support as well as hardware transcoding. Best of all, Catalyst 5.13 will be a free upgrade scheduled to be released to the public next week."

7 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. all i have to say is by know1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    whenever i have used ATI on either windows or linux, something usually made the 3D display prone to being buggy as hell. maybe it's hardware, maybe it's thje driver, but nvidia have always been rock solid for me. maybe this improvement will fix ATI's problems

  2. Support for Older Cards? by bchernicoff · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What will they do for my 9800?

    1. Re:Support for Older Cards? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I don't know, I read the whole article and it says nothing about older cards only the X1800.

  3. Ditto here by phorm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    On the laptop I run the ATI drivers, all up to the newest, remind me of the nightmarish win9x days with older ATI cards. In windows my previous experience with ATI cards has been frightening as well. What good are features and clarity if you're getting bluescreens or freezing?

    Now to be fair the NVidia cards have had some bugs, but generally not anything that seriously impacted usability, and the fix-time was usually much quicker for turnover.

  4. My main beef with the comparison.. by Fallen+Kell · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I just have one "minor" beef with the review. For all the image quality tests in this, they are compairing the current generation ATI 1800XL (the low end, high end card) against a last generation nVidia middle line card. To be fair, it should be against the nVidia 7800GT... but who is really looking at these things anyway.

    Will it make a whole lot of difference if a 7800GT was used or not? I don't know for sure, but at least it would be fresh apples vs fresh oranges comparison, not fresh apples vs moldy oranges... The 7800GT's have hardware H.264 and more hardware help for de-interlacing then the 6600 does. Do a fair comparison is all I can say.

    --
    We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
  5. The moment you bought it by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The moment you bought it. Certainly the moment I bought it. Sigh, next machine will probably have to be a dual core sli 2gig monster. Really sad thing? My current p4 will be scrap as it consumers to much power and doesn't have the desktop performance for of my ancient dual p3 setup.

    Oh well I can wait a bit. Apart from Sony MMO games most games still play well enough.

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

  6. Re:PPU by SpinJaunt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    if you search one of the above companies say that there products are already powerful enough not to need ush things, which given some of the physics I've seen in some of the more recent games is quite true, although I still wonder how much the CPU plays part, not the GPU.

    Maybe if M$ was to update DirectX and require more physics related hardware accelerated physics then it might well hold and the whole PPU thing would pretty much sink, atleast as a seperate card, it would be just an additional unit inside the GPU.

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    /. is good for you.