Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

11 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. Best of all... by daVinci1980 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...is that a hardware vendor is releasing drivers for free?

    Welcome to 2005, I realize things must be strange for you considering you've been frozen since 1930...

    --
    I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
    1. Re:Best of all... by hawkbug · · Score: 4, Informative

      I believe the point of that original statement was concerning the H.264 and DVD codec improvements compared to their main competitor, Nvidia. As you may or may not know, Nvidia charges money for their DVD codec:

      http://www.nvidia.com/object/dvd_decoder.html

      I will never buy another ATI product again because I've been burned so badly by drivers in the past - however, I'll give ATI credit for not following in the greedy footsteps of their competitor, Nvidia. Charging for a DVD codec that's optimized for their hardware is just stupid. It's not bad enough they charge hundreds of dollars for the hardware? I applaud ATI for this move.

    2. Re:Best of all... by Jerry+Coffin · · Score: 4, Informative
      I'll give ATI credit for not following in the greedy footsteps of their competitor, Nvidia. Charging for a DVD codec that's optimized for their hardware is just stupid.

      There is a fundamental difference between the two though: ATI is providing this in the form of a driver that only works with ATI graphics cards. nVidia PureVideo, by contrast, is standard-based (admittedly not what you'd call an open standard, but a standard nonetheless) so it works with any video card that implements the standard.

      IOW, ATIs offering is "free", but tied directly to their hardware. nVidia's offering isn't tied to any particular hardware and is paid for directly instead.

      In most cases, "free" means you pay for it whether you want it or not.

      --
      The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
  3. Support for Older Cards? by bchernicoff · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What will they do for my 9800?

  4. Scoring system odd by ironwill96 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    FTFA: The Radeon X800 XL with Catalyst 5.12 failed miserably on both of these tests. The Radeon X1800 XL with Catalyst 5.13 flies through these tests with flying colors. Both XGI and ATI require a little bit of extra time to detect the 3:2 cadence in comparison to NVIDIA, but it's still fast enough to score a perfect score.

    Their verdict from this:
    Score
    Tied 3rd place: ATI, NVIDIA, XGI (10 points)

    So apparently their scoring system favors ATI from the get-go (read the article and you will see they knock Nvidia and XGI back if they take longer than the other, but as shown above they ignore the same discrepancy when it applies to ATI). Also, why are they tied for third!? Wouldn't that be tied for first?
    I think this article is poorly written and i'm not going to trust the results until I see something from some other sites once a final release driver is out.

    --
    "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
    1. Re:Scoring system odd by hattig · · Score: 4, Informative

      Blame the benchmark. You get full scores for cadence detection if the card has detected it before the car gets to a certain point in the video. Being faster doesn't matter if the other card is still fast enough.

      The site hasn't assigned arbitrary scores.

      The benchmark is an industry standard one, btw. It's probably not perfect, but a couple of frames here and there wouldn't alter the scores significantly in the end if the scoring was finer grained.

  5. Re:huh? by Dster76 · · Score: 4, Informative
    From TFA:

    In comparison, PureVideo has never been free. It starts off at $20 for the "bronze" edition with basic SPDIF out support or 2 channel audio, $30 for the gold version with 5.1 analog out, and $50 for the platinum version with DTS support. When price shopping for a new GPU, if you're going with NVIDIA you need to factor in the extra $20 that you wouldn't have to with a built-by-ATI card.

    Here's a link to nVidia's PureVideo that seems to confirm that it
    • isn't free
    • does much the same things as the new free ATI software described in TFA
  6. Re:free drivers? What a country! by hattig · · Score: 5, Informative

    Err, the equivalent nVidia software is $20 to $50, if you had read the article or other comments here. The base drivers are free, yes. The extra features are free on ATI's side, but not free on nVidia's side. Expect nVidia to fight back within a couple of months with better algorithms and free/cheaper software.

    The same site gave nVidia the lead just earlier in the month, prior to these new drivers. Doesn't sound like they're paid off to me. The benchmark scores are how the benchmark defines them, and the site didn't make the benchmark. Your post is just a typical hysterical (and probably fanboy) overreaction that slanders a website that has put a lot of effort into showing what the latest drivers can provide for a user. Pretty sad, really.

  7. 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"
  8. Re:V 5.13 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not really.

    Ati's naming scheme is this: major version number is the last years number (2004=4, 2005=5, 2006=6 etc) and the minor version number is the month. On special occasions the realese special versions, like this 5.13 at the end of the year.

    So, no, the version number says absolutely nothing about the amount of changes. The driver also have a 'real' version number displayed deep down somehwere in the control panel for real version number diehards.