ATI's Avivo vs. NVIDIA's PureVideo: De-Interlacing Quality Compared

Late last month. ATI announced their Avivo platform, which would become ATI's new baseline for overall picture and video quality on the PC.  The problem with ATI's launch last month was that, without any R5xx GPUs, the Avivo platform was literally nothing more than ATI's Theater 550 TV tuner, which is pretty much old news by this point.  Luckily, today we have ATI's Radeon X1800, X1600 and X1300 GPUs, all of which are Avivo compliant GPUs, so we can begin actually testing the features of Avivo.  Well, not exactly.

Despite what ATI told us at our Avivo briefing last month (although ATI insists that it was a miscommunication), H.264 decode acceleration is not launching alongside the R5xx GPUs.  ATI is committed to bringing both H.264 decode acceleration and transcode assist by the end of the year, but for now, we have no way of testing those features. Update: Just to clarify, the R5xx GPUs do feature hardware support for H.264 acceleration. We have seen the decode acceleration in action on an X1800 twice, once at Computex and once at ATI's Avivo briefing in NYC. What ATI does not yet have ready is driver and application support for the acceleration, which we are hearing will be ready sometime in November, or at least by the end of the year.

The capture and encoding aspects of Avivo, we've already looked at with the Theater 550, which leaves Avivo's 10-bit display pipeline, Xileon TV encoder, dual-link DVI, and ATI's enhanced de-interlacing/video scaling.  And we're holding off on testing the Xileon TV encoder until we get a component dongle for the cards.

Two of the aforementioned features are very easy to talk about, especially now that we have ATI's solutions in house.  For starters, the 10-bit display pipeline is truly difficult to quantify, much less demonstrate as a noticeable advantage in normal usage that the R5xx GPUs offer over their predecessors.  While there is undoubtedly some advantage, during our short time with the cards focusing on Avivo testing, we weren't able to discern that advantage. 

The next feature that's easy to talk about is the R5xx's integrated dual-link TMDS transmitter(s).  As we mentioned in our original Avivo preview, this means that any R5xx GPU should be able to support current and upcoming high-resolution LCD monitors, such as Apple's 30" Cinema Display.  It is up to the board manufacturer to decide how many dual-link DVI ports are placed on a specific board, but the GPU should support a minimum of one dual-link DVI port. 

The Radeon X1800 series will support up to two dual-link DVI ports, while the X1600 and X1300 will support up to one dual-link and one single-link port. 

We, of course, tested the new GPUs' dual link DVI with Apple's 30" Cinema Display, and here, we ran into our first problem.  The RV515 (Radeon X1300) board that we were sent by ATI only had a single-link DVI output and one analog VGA output on it for some reason.  A quick email to ATI revealed that the board that we had was just a reference board, and the shipping version of the card would be equipped with a dual-link DVI port.

So, we switched to the Radeon X1600 card that ATI sent us (RV530), and that worked perfectly.  The card had no problems running at the 30" display's native 2560 x 1600 resolution.

With those features out of the way, it was time to test the most intricate feature of Avivo that we had available to us: ATI's updated de-interlacing and scaling algorithms.

Before proceeding, be sure that you've read our primer on why de-interlacing is necessary and what contributes to good image quality while de-interlacing.