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H.264 - Does it work yet?

Our new Radeon X1K video hardware is in excellent shape and working as expected. As you have seen at Computex this year (early June), we demonstrated H.264 on an R520 at 30% CPU utilization, so the hardware is simply awesome. Our drivers are not yet tuned to match the capabilities of our hardware - this is expected considering how much more advanced the Radeon X1K architecture is in terms of video.

I will not BS anyone, our drivers are not yet tuned to match the capabilities of our hardware in terms of video performance and quality. That being said, we will have H.264 (and DVD enhancements) by the end of this year. I know that some customers were burned last year when a vendor claimed to have a VPU only not to deliver. ATI is well renowned for our video capabilities and I can assure our customers that the video & display hardware in the Radeon X1K is the best in the world, and we will roll out the video enhancements (along with faster 3D) throughout the next few Catalyst releases.

Excellent question, H.264 is so new that there is no standard API for DXVA acceleration yet. So we have worked with our industry partners such as Cyberlink and Intervideo to develop one. We will of course support any API from Microsoft but this is not expected for awhile. Some vendors may be working on custom proprietary applications to run H.264 but this is not ATI’s focus. We view H.264 as another CODEC that we need to enable in various applications by API. Beyond Cyberlink and Intervideo, we see leaders like Sonic and Nero as companies we would like to support closely.

As I wrote in the previous question, we will definitely enable other applications, this is the future. ATI is a hardware company, i.e. we make money selling hardware, it is in our best interest and in the interest of all consumers to enable as many third party applications as possible and not limit the H.264 experience to a custom application. Custom applications may serve a short-term need but it is a dead end with XP MCE and Vista. BTW, VFW is deader than dead…..get with the new century.

I don’t have numbers for you at this time…..but as an indicator of how powerful our transcoders and hardware are, we showed an MPEG2 to WMV9 transcoder solution that was 10X faster than that of Microsoft’s at CES early this year. We expect the H.264 transcoding to be impressive as well.

We have only gone on record so far with the R520, where we demonstrated 1080i H.264 at 30% CPU utilization. Let’s be frank……our goal is to enable HD H.264 top-to-bottom. I cannot speak for our competitors……but I can say our hardware rocks and that the world is not just Standard Definition MPEG2 :)

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