ATI All-In-Wonder HD, A Legend Returns

Monday, August 18, 2008 - by Jeff Bouton in Graphics/Sound
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When ATI was acquired by AMD a few years ago, one product that seemed to fall off of the new corporate radar was ATI's All-In-Wonder line of Graphics/TV-Tuner hybrid cards.  This was an area of the market where ATI had exclusivity, yet we haven't seen a new All-In-Wonder offering since May 2006.  Rest assured however, ATI has not abandoned the All-In-Wonder, they've simply been working on the next iteration of the Graphic/TV-Tuner stalwart, with their latest offering coming in the form of the ATI All-In-Wonder HD.

Back on 2004, ATI released its first HDTV Wonder TV card and now, four years later, they've merged HDTV capabilities with a graphics card, which is the culmination of the new All-In-Wonder HD we'll be looking at here today.  In the four years since the HDTV Wonder was released, a lot has changed.  While its HDTV Tuner for the PC was one of the first of its kind, the market may not have been ripe for such a product, with limitations of OTA digital signal, and a bulky antenna, being a major detractor.  Today however, with the change over to DTV broadcasting immanent, this could be a prime time to offer a hybrid class card that can grow with the new transmission medium of Digital broadcasting.

The All-In-Wonder HD continues on the All-In-Wonder path of melding a graphics card with the latest TV-Tuner technologies into a single package.  With this version, the All-In-Wonder HD breaks new ground, being the first All-In-Wonder to bring ClearQAM support to the mix.  Being the first new addition to the popular product line in over two years, naturally we were eager to get working with the All-In-Wonder HD to see what ATI had in store for us this time around.  Read on to follow our journey as we break it down, set up, benchmark and assess the All-In-Wonder HD's overall qualities to see what this latest iteration has to offer. 

 

ATI All-In-Wonder HD

A Multimedia Legend Returns

* ATI All-in-Wonder™ HD - GPU Specifications

  • 378 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
  • PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
  • 128-bit DDR2 memory interface
  • Ring Bus Memory Controller
  • Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes

* Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
          
* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

  • 120 stream processing units
  •  Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
  • Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
  • Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
  • 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
  • Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
  • Shader instruction and constant caches
  • Up to 40 texture fetches per clock cycle
  • Up to 128 textures per pixel
  • Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
  • DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
  • High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
  • Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
  • Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
  • Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
  • Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
  • Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
  • 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
  • Physics processing support 


* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration

  • High performance vertex cache
  • Programmable tessellation unit
  • Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
  • Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance


* Anti-aliasing features

  • Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
  • Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
  • Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
  • Temporal anti-aliasing
  • Gamma correct
  • All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering


* Texture filtering features

  • 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
  • 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
  • Bicubic filtering
  • sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
  • Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
  • Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
  • Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

* OpenGL 2.0 support

* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform

  • Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
  • High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats2
  • Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
  • Motion compensation and IDCT
  • ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
  • Color space conversion
  • Chroma subsampling format conversion
  • Horizontal and vertical scaling
  • Gamma correction
  • Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
  • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  • Detail enhancement
  • Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
  • Two independent display controllers
  • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each displayFull 30-bit display processing
  • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
  • Fast, glitch-free mode switching
  • Hardware cursor
  • Integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDAC
  • Supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15361
  • HDMI output support
  • Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080
  • ntegrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
  • Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
  • + Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
  • Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
  • Underscan and overscan compensation
  • MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
  • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time

* ATI PowerPlay™

  • Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
  • Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required

1 Some custom resolutions require user configuration
2 Playing HDCP content requires additional HDCP ready components, including but not limited to an HDCP ready monitor, Blu-ray or HD DVD disc drive, multimedia application and computer operating system .

ATI Radeon™ HD graphics chips have numerous features integrated into the processor itself (e.g., HDCP, HDMI, etc.). Third parties manufacturing products based on, or incorporating ATI Radeon HD graphics chips, may choose to enable some or all of these features. If a particular feature is important to you, please inquire of the manufacturer if a particular product supports this feature. In addition, some features or technologies may require you to purchase additional components in order to make full use of them (e.g. a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive, HDCP-ready monitor, etc.). 


 



At testing time, ATI didn't have a complete retail package for us to evaluate, rather a plain vanilla factory package including the All-In-Wonder HD and some expected accessories.  There will be varying options with the base card being offered and an All-In-Wonder HD Accessory kit, which will include an Audio/Video I/O daughter board to expand on the card's functionality for those looking for additional connectivity options.  This could be a good approach for keeping the product competitively priced and not over producing accessories that users may never use. One item missing from this package was a remote control.  To help moderate costs, ATI has opted not to pursue a remote control solution, insteading leaving it up to the company's marketing the All-In-Wonder HD to add their own as they see fit.

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