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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
 
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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.
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