Video Acceleration - Nvidia Purevideo, X-Video Motion Compensation, Vdpau, Unified Video Decoder, Video Acceleration API, Ati Avivo (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Nvidia Purevideo, X-Video Motion Compensation, Vdpau, Unified Video Decoder, Video Acceleration Api, Ati Avivo, Directx Video Acceleration, X-Video Bitstream Acceleration. Excerpt: ATI Avivo logo (2005 2007) ATI Avivo is a set of hardware and low level software features present on the ATI Radeon R520 family of GPUs and all later ATI Radeon products. ATI Avivo was designed to offload video decoding, encoding, and post-processing from a computer's CPU to a compatible GPU. ATI Avivo compatible GPUs have lower CPU usage when a player and decoder software that support ATI Avivo is used. However, the GPU itself does not convert TV signals to video signals usable on computer monitors. Such jobs are done by Rage Theater or Theater 200 on reference video card designs, and the availability of such decoder depends on the decision of implementation of the manufacturer and market positions of various models. Like NVIDIA PureVideo HD, ATI Avivo does not offer any actual decoding software. Background The GPU wars between ATI and NVIDIA have resulted in GPUs with ever increasing processing power since early 2000s. To parallel this increase in speed and power, both GPU makers needed to increase video quality as well, in 3D graphics applications the focus in increasing quality has mainly fallen on anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering . However it has dawned upon both companies that video quality on the PC would need improvement as well and the current APIs provided by both companies have not seen many improvements over a few generations of GPUs. Therefore, ATI decided to revamp its GPU's video processing capability with ATI Avivo, in order to compete with NVIDIA PureVideo API. In the time of release of the latest generation Radeon HD series, the successor, the ATI Avivo HD was announced, a...