ATI All-In-Wonder 2006

Introduction

ATI's All-In-Wonder series has been popular with the multimedia enthusiast for quite some time now, delivering all the features of a TV Tuner, along with the performance of a dedicated graphics card. ATI has recently released their X1900 AIW series, which is a perfect card to get if you're a gamer and have the cash to spend. But what about those who are just looking for the features of an All-In-Wonder card, and consider gaming to be a side luxury?  For this end of the market, ATI presents you with their All-In-Wonder 2006. This budget level PCI-E card is based on ATI's Radeon X1300 core GPU and uses ATI's Theatre 200 chip. We would have liked to see ATI using their newer more powerful Theater 550 Pro chip. However driver advancements and ATI's H.264 decode acceleration algorithms help beef up processing with the Thearter 200. Still, there's no hardware MPEG-2 encode support, which ATI's Theater 550 Pro has.

In addition, AIW 2006 doesn't have the pixel pushing power of the AIW X1900 but priced in at around $200, we'll be focusing on it's feature set more so than it's gaming performance. We'll also be doing some testing to see how well the card is able to take the load off of the CPU during digital media playback, and judging it by it's overall value for its price range. Let's not get ahead of ourselves though, first we'll need to cover the specs.

ATI All-In-Wonder 2006
All the same features as the big boys, at fraction of the price

Features - ATI All-In-Winder 2006
• 90nm fabrication process
• Ultra-threaded architecture with fast dynamic branching
• 4 pixel shader units
• 128-bit GDDR3 memory interface
• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface
• Dynamic Voltage Control

Ring Bus Memory Controller
• Programmable intelligent arbitration logic
• Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
• Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
• Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine
• Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
• Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
• Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
• Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
• Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
• 3Dc+ texture compression
_o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
_o High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
• Render to vertex buffer support
• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL 2.0

Avivo Video and Display Engine
• High performance programmable video processor
_o Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding (including DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback), encoding & transcoding
_o DXVA support
_o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
_o Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
_o Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
_o 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• HDR tone mapping acceleration
_o Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
• Flexible display support
_o Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
_o DVI 1.0 / HDMI compliant and HDCP ready
_o Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
_o 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
_o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
_o Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
_o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
_o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
_o Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analog output
_o YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
_o Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
_o Fast, glitch-free mode switching
_o VGA mode support on all outputs
• Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

Advanced Image Quality Features
• 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
_o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
• 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
_o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
_o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
_o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
_o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
_o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
_o Up to 128-tap texture filtering
_o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)


TV-Tuner Requirements
_TV signal from amplified antenna or cable. Versions available for:
_NTSC (North America, Japan and Latin America)
_Universal PAL/Secam/DVB-T (Europe and International PAL/Secam/DVB-T countries)
_MulTView requires additional supported ATI PCI TV Wonder card, compatible motherboard and soundcard

*Features vary from country to country and depending on the television standard. Note that Latin American countries using the PAL M and PAL N standards including Argentina and Brazil are supported by the NTSC version.

 

Connectors
_DVI-I and VGA
_Stereo audio
_S-video
_Composite video inputs
_Composite video outputs
_External stereo connections to sound card's line input and output
_YPrPb Output adapter (available in North America)


Highlights:
_Watch up to 125 channels on your computer
_Personal Video Recorder functionality allows users to record programs on your hard drive, pause live TV and resume broadcasts on your schedule
_Listen to Stereo FM on your PC
_Gemstar GUIDE Plus+ provides free interactive programming guides to select, schedule and record your favorite shows
_Control your computer from a distance using your Remote Wonder PLUS or MCE Remote Control** (optional)
_Easily capture and edit your home videos and burn to DVD's/Video CD
_Enjoy dual tuner capabilities such as Picture-in-Picture with ATI's MultiView *
_Theatre 200 video decoder powers your PC with high quality video
_Transfer high-definition component video output via a YPrPb adapter
_DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial)portable and mobile TV support in Europe
_Windows XP Media Center Edition compatible

Includes free software:

• Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0

 

 

 


 


Tags:  ATI

Related content