For years, ATI has held the reputation for industry leading video acceleration. It seems that each successive generation has ushered in a new video feature for their competition to try and match. Nearly every new high-end OEM system ships with a DVD drive, enabling MPEG-2 video playback for an increasing number of households.

Video features are most easily understood if they are split into two categories: Quality and Performance.

Performance features assist the CPU in the decoding process, leaving the CPU free to handle other applications. System requirements are also lowered, since powerful processors aren't needed for full-frame decoding. Motion compensation is the first of these features, decreasing CPU load by about 25%. Also integrated into the RADEON core is an iDCT engine, which compliments the motion compensation unit. iDCT accounts for roughly 15% of the decoding process, so a machine boasting both of these features will enjoy roughly 40% less CPU utilization than a system lacking them.

Some of the performance features may also bleed into the quality category. For instance, motion compensation uses a 9-bit error term that may be truncated to 8-bits by some engines, resulting in a loss of quality. ATI's motion compensation engine uses the full 9-bits to maintain video integrity, and does not suffer the same loss. In addition, the RADEON also supports alpha subpicture blending. This is another quality-targeted feature that takes a menu or subtitle and blends it to the background in hardware to avoid stressing the CPU with the signal processing that is associated with alpha blending.

Perhaps the biggest addition to ATI's video repertoire for the RADEON is adaptive de-interlacing, a quality feature that blends bob and weave de-interlacing on a per-pixel level for a smoother image. If motion is detected on any given pixel, bob interlacing is used, and if there is no motion on the pixel, weave interlacing is instead used. Unfortunately, adaptive de-interlacing isn't recognized by Video2000, so the numbers that are returned by MadOnion's video benchmark on the RADEON do not represent actual performance.

Many readers have requested feedback on ATI's HDTV support. Unfortunately, a DTV tuner is also needed in order to pick up the digital signal. Currently, the only available solution is from Hauppauge, which converts all DTV signals into a 480 window. We will hold off on HDTV testing until ATI releases their DTV solution with more functionality. As we learned at the recent IDF conference, PC DTV is about six months away.

In keeping with ATI's OEM-centric mentality, there are no secret tabs or built-in overclocking utilities such as we have seen on the GeForce2 GTS and Voodoo5 drivers. Instead, EntechTaiwan has taken an early jump and support for the RADEON is built into PowerStrip 2.7 Beta and the preliminary version of PowerStrip 3.

Unfortunately, PowerStrip didn't recognize the core frequency for the RADEON, and any changes made to the memory frequency resulted in a distorted 2D image, making it impossible for us to test the RADEON's overclocking capabilities.