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ATi All-In-Wonder VE: Want the absolute latest TV-Tuner and consumer level video editing card, but don't want to fork over the big bucks? What if I said you can get all this for under 105$? Yup, you read that right, so keep reading...

Date: March 10, 2003
Manufacturer:
Written By:
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Though the use of computers is still mostly for work, or more importantly, playing the latest video games, more and more people are looking for something that can do it all. We're talking about a video card that can play games, power your 2D desktop, and output to TV. Better still is a card that can also double as a TV tuner, and allow for some TiVO action. So what do you do to get TV on your PC?

One solution is to keep your current card, and grab a TV-Tuner, which is a good idea if already own a decent AGP card. What if your video card is less than stellar though? Worse still, what if your AGP video is integrated? Though a TV-Tuner will get you your favorite episode of Friends, most lack video editing capabilities, let alone any acceleration for your favorite action game. This can be a problem if you are building a home theatre PC, and would still like to play a game or two occasionally. Ideally, you'll want a card that can do it all.

There are not many cards that can do this. nVidia's Personal Cinema is an add-on to their video cards, and frankly, it isn't easy to find any that pairs up with the GeForce 4. ATi has their All-In-Wonder series, which in my opinion does the best job of bringing everything together.

This brings us to the question of cost. The AiW 9700 Pro, the current flagship, doesn't come cheap. ATi has addressed the cost concerns with a new AiW 9000, but it may still be a bit pricey for some people. That is where the ATi AiW Radeon VE comes in. It's cheap, provides TV-Tuner and video editing capabilities, and is powered by the Radeon 7500, which is no screamer, but will let you play most games at acceptable framerates. Though not everyone has an AGP slot, everyone will have a PCI slot, which will work out fine since the AiW VE is a PCI part. The reasoning behind this is ATi is gearing the AiW VE as an inexpensive solution for people who own systems without AGP slots. If you're wondering why an enthusiast would care, well, early adopters jumped on the first Shuttle SFFs, given the decent performance, and portability, but got sacked for poor integrated video performance. These very PCs can now get a new lease on life with the AiW VE as an inexpensive TiVo.

Specifications

Powered by the RADEON™ 7500 graphical processing unit (RV200)
PCI interface
64MB DDR memory accelerates the latest in video games and applications
THEATER™ 200 provides exceptional video quality viewing during live TV and video input and capture
Pinnacle Studio™ 8, ATI Version, allows for ease of creation for personal video masterpieces

Unmatched TV and DVD Features
Stereo TV tuner with 125 channels
TV-ON-DEMAND™: Pause live TV, record broadcasts, and video playback
Integrated Gemstar GUIDE Plus+™ for scheduling and recording TV programs
THRUVIEW™ allows for translucent viewing of TV - never move your TV window to get to your work again

Easily Edit Videos In Your Own Creations
Capture still images and video for use in your own creations
Add effects, transitions, and sound to video footage
Save your authored videos to VideoCD and DVD format

Revolutionary New Video Features
THEATER™ 200 provides exceptional video quality viewing during live TV and video input and capture

The ATi AiW Radeon VE arrived in the typical red box we're accustomed to with ATi. The packaging contains all the information you need on what the card is capable of. At a street price of about , you get a lot of functionality for your hard earned ducats. Packaging is neat, with the card, manual and CD on the upper half of the packaging, and the rest of the stuff on the bottom.


AiW 8500DV (left), AiW VE (right)

The AiW VE is not a large card at all, though it is a full sized one. I'm mentioning this because although it should fit in most cases, half height cases (Slim PCs) won't be able to use this card without a PCI riser.

Powering the AiW VE is the RV200, aka the Radeon 7500 graphical processing unit. It isn't the most powerful GPU (ok, it isn't all that great for the latest pixel pushing games), but it does have T&L support. There is only DirectX 7 hardware support, which means there's no pixel and vertex shader support. It is essentially a die shrunk R100, and is based on a .15µ manufacturing process.

Given its manufacturing process, and the fact that it isn't clocked nearly as high as the 8500 and 9700 AiWs, the VE uses passive cooling to keep the GPU cool. Even after some gaming, I didn't find the heatsink too warm, so this should be more than enough. The upside to this approach is that without a fan, the card naturally runs silent. The last thing you need when setting up a PC theatre is more noise.

I half expected generic TSOP memory chips to adorn the AiW VE. Let's face it… most budget cards don't use BGA memory, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover this.

On the back of the card, you have all you various I/O choices. Missing is a DVI connection, so if you've been dreaming of outputting the video to a nice DVI LCD, keep on dreaming.

Missing from the bundle is the ATi Remote Wonder. Given the low price, it's understandable why they omitted the remote, but providing a discount coupon, or maybe bundling it with the AiW VE for an extra 30$ would have been a good idea.

The Radeon 7500

The Radeon 7500 is no spring chicken. It lacks today's hot features found in the Radeon 9700, and in fact, it is missing items found in the Radeon 8500. Its feature set actually mirrors that of the Radeon. It has two rendering pipelines, each having three texture units, giving it the ability to apply 6 textures in a single pass.

The Charisma engine is the T&L engine behind the Radeon 7500. By now, T&L is a standard feature on most high-end cards, though this implementation is about two generations behind.

To address memory bandwidth issues, Hyper-Z is present in the Radeon 7500 architecture. There are three components of Hyper-Z…

The first is Hierarchical Z, which hides pixels that won't be displayed in a 3D image. The second is Z Compression, which can compress data going to the Z buffer, which could provide a bit of a speed benefit for AA, or high-res performance. Finally, Fast Z Clear clears the Z buffer between rendered frames. At high resolutions, waiting for the Z buffer to clear can take a long time since it requires a large amount of data must be written to every frame to clear it. Hyper Z needs just a fraction of the same data, making it much faster.

The Rage Theater 200

The Rage Theater 200 is ATi's latest Video Processing Engine (VPE). Despite being a budget card, it's nice to see ATi including the same VPE as the one found in their top end AiW 9700 Pro.

Previously, the Rage Theater and the Micronas stereo decoder handled the duties for the All-in-Wonder line, so the Rage Theater 200 effectively kills two birds with one stone by doing both chores. The new chip is more than the sum of its parts though, and a few improvements were made along the way.

Thanks to its dual 12-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADC), image and sound quality gets bumped up a notch. The earlier cards used 9-bit converters, so the 12-bit ADC should improve things quite a bit by cleaning up some of the noise associated when converting an analog stream.

Image quality wise, there is a new (actually, it's third generation) 3-line comb filter. For composite video signals, the picture is improved because they are more accurately processed. Previously, only 2-lines were used for NTSC. Given the limitations of cable TV technology, the improvements may not be readily obvious, but a side-by-side comparison with an AiW Radeon 8500DV showed a slight improvement. Hooked up to a satellite, I noticed an improvement over the older Rage Theater almost immediately.

TV-Tuner

ATi has reverted back to an analog TV-Tuner, rather than continuing with a digital tuner. I was a look confused with this decision, but since the majority of the public still uses an analog cable for TV viewing, there isn't really any point adding the digital tuner, which makes the chip more complex than it needs to be. This is also a cost saver, and in real-world use, I didn't find the AiW VE slower than the AiW 8500DV when it came to switching channels.

The Cobra Engine

Usually found in high end pro-sumer video cards, the AiW 9700 and AiW VE bring hardware MPEG-2 decoding and MPEG-2 encoding to the consumer level. The Cobra Engine is capable of Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (iDCT), which is really a fancy way of saying it can decode MPEG-2 streams with minimal CPU usage. This can make a difference when viewing DVDs on your PC, as you no longer have to shop for a dedicated DVD decoder, and no longer have to rely on software based decoding.

Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), or MPEG-2 encoding, is done in hardware, which for casual video editing buffs, means less work on your CPU. ATi claims a maximum of 20-25% of the encoding process can be taken off the CPU, which could result in less time needed to encode a movie file, or at least, more CPU processing power to perform other tasks.

Videosoap is a feature found within the Cobra Engine that cleans up the image. It isn't designed for MPEGs you already have, but rather, it uses four filters to clean up the signal coming in from the input video. Other than cleaning up the image, it also serves to reduce the file size since noise isn't something that can easily be compressed, so with less noise, you'll end up with smaller files.

Installation

There are a couple of audio connections to be aware of. There is a CD out connection at the top of the card that needs to be plugged into the CD audio-in connection on your sound card. One annoying fact about this is that ATi does not include the cable (they didn't include it with the 8500DV either), so if your sound card doesn't have the cable, you'll have to go buy one.


Click to Enlarge

The next connection is on the output cable, which is the Line Audio Out. You have to plug this into the line-in connection on your sound card. If you don't do this, you won't get any sound at all from the AiW VE.

Video is outputted by a couple of methods. You have your standard VGA connection, or the video-out connection. How to use the VGA connection is obvious, and if not, you better click on the small "x" on your browser because I'm not going to explain why.

The AiW VE comes with a video output cable that plugs directly into the video out of the card. This cable is used to output video (be it something you already pre-recorded, or if the PC is acting as a conduit for your home theatre setup) to a TV or VCR. Depending on the type of TV or VCR you have, you can output the video via S-Video or composite. Generally, as most home theatre junkies know (which I didn't, somebody just told me this), S-Video will result in a better picture, which makes sense, since the "S" means "Super". As we'll get into later on though, ATi made a few changes that actually improve on the composite cable signal.

The one obvious input is for the coaxial cable input. Be it cable or satellite, just plug the coax cable into the coaxial cable input, and you have access for up to 125 channels.


Click to Enlarge

Other than being a TV-tuner, the other selling point of the AiW VE is the ability to edit video. You have a 4-headed block for the inputs that plugs into the video in port. The block provides a S-Video input and a composite video input. Like the output, you can only use one input at any given time, and which one you use will depend on how the video (VCR or camcorder) is being outputted into the input block.

For audio, the block also has left and right audio inputs. You will need to plug something in there if you want audio in whatever video you are outputting to the AiW VE. The S-Video-in or composite-in only serves to run video into the card, so you'll need to run audio cables from the output device into the appropriate left/right channel inputs.

Software Bundle

There are three major parts to the software bundle of the All-In-Wonder VE.

ATi Multimedia Center

The MMC is the cornerstone of the package, providing everything from music playback, to DVD, to VCD, to television. It is from here that all your options that the card supports is available.

Of interest is the television aspect of the MMC. When you set everything up, the first thing you'll want to do is start the television Initialization Wizard.

You go through a series of options. You'll need to select the country and the type of coax connection you'll be using to watch TV.

It takes a minute or so to scan the channel grid and afterwards, it's just a matter of setting up the default format of how you want to record shows and parental control.

Guide Plus+

If TiVo functionality is what you want, Guide Plus+ is about as close as you'll get for the PC. From here, you can preview shows, set up recording schedules, and see what'll be on later that day or week. Every few days, the program will need to download the latest schedule, which is a bit of an annoyance if you haven't fired up Guide Plus+ in a couple of weeks.

You're provided with a lot of information, from program descriptions, to the type of show, and the actors. If you were looking for a reason not to resubscribe to TV Guide, this is it.

Pinnacle Studio 8.4

For the aspiring Speilbergs, ATi packages Pinnacle Studio 8.4, which is an easy to use video editing software. It's not at the level of Adobe Premiere, but for casual directors, you can be editing Uncle Joe out of your home videos in no time.

A video editing card is no good if it doesn't help the CPU out in encoding a video. I captured an episode of Futurama (about 20 minutes), and proceeded to encode it into MPEG-2 format. It ended up taking close to 83 minutes. On an AiW 8500DV, the same file took 86 minutes, so it would appear that the Theater 200 and Cobra Engine do improve encoding times slightly.

Test Setup

Epox 8RDA+ nForce2: Athlon XP 2400+ provided by (15x133: 2.0GHz), 2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700 Ram, ATi All-In-Wonder VE, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.0, ATi Catalyst 3.0

Benchmarks

In an ideal world, I'd run the VE against a 7500 All-In-Wonder, but we don't have any in the labs. We'll be running the AiW VE against itself. All benchmarks are at default settings, unless otherwise noted. I am not including any high quality benchmarks for a couple reasons. First off, they'll just end up scoring lower than the benchmarks being done today, but that is a given. Secondly, any serious gamer who does turn up the eye candy will probably opt for the higher end AiW 9700 Pro.


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