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Written by Nebojsa Todorovic
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Wednesday, 23 May 2007 |
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Page 7 of 13
The HD card prefix is not without a reason. AMD kept up with the tradition of fantastic video acceleration in its cards, primarily compared to the competition. nVidia's G80 offered relatively little, with the “real thing” being implemented only on the newest G84 chips. Still, as usual, ATi is stronger in this field. What contributes to this is the fact that whatever is possible on the HD 2900XT will be equally available on the HD 2400, something that is praiseworthy and something that many a user will appreciate. The technology implemented by AMD is called UVD and it is based on the concept that all video playback should be accelerated by the GPU.
That implies minimal use of CPU resources, unlike in the case of G84/G86. The HD video decoding is done through 4 phases: Bitstream Processing/Entropy Decode, Frequency Transform, Pixel Prediction, and finally Deblocking. All of these are executed in the GPU in this case. Therefore, the new Radeon series is one that ensures the lowest possible CPU utilization. Along with all of this, the GPU integrates the aforementioned audio controller which makes it unique. This may as well be one of AMD's primary trumps, as this is definitely the strongest point of the new series.
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