ATI Radeon HD 4800: Introducing the New Video Engine

Besides a number of innovations inside the ATI RV770 graphics processing unit, the chip also sports numerous enhancements when it comes to video engine. In particular, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices implemented a new audio controller into the ATI RV770 GPU as well as added certain software improvements.

The main enhancement of ATI Radeon HD 4800 high-definition video feature-set is a new audio controller from Realtek, which now supports 7.1 channel audio with up to 6.144Mb/s bitrate and 192KHz sample rate along with AC3, DTS, Dolby True-HD and DTS-HD support. The new audio controller will allow ATI’s new hardware to output better quality audio via HDMI port, which is likely to become an important feature for home-theater personal computers. Furthermore, ATI Radeon HD 4800 is now the only graphics card that natively supports 7.1 audio output over HDMI, a tangible advantage over the competing products.

The video playback engine of ATI Radeon HD 4800 features universal video decoder 2 (UVD), which now supports dual-stream video playback (which is useful while watching Blu-ray or HD DVD movies with picture-in-picture feature enabled) with bitstream processing present for all codecs used nowadays: VC-1, H.264 and MPEG-2 HD. We are unsure whether this is a hardware-based innovation or an improvement of software, but we will check this out at the earlier opportunity.

An interesting feature that ATI/AMD advertises is high-quality upscaling of DVD content to HD and up-conversion of HD content to beyond HD resolution. The company is tight-lipped regarding patterns its products use, therefore, they both should be checked before making any conclusions.

It worth a note that ATI, just like Nvidia several months ago, has implemented dynamic contrast adjustment for video with the new drivers, something, with which videophiles will hardly be pleased. The content is filmed and adjusted in accordance with directors’ decisions and some other requirements, not with decisions of driver developers, which means that dynamic contrast tuning is a very debatable thing in general.

Finally, the new ATI Radeon HD 4800 can encode high-definition video into H.264 or MPEG2-HD formats with its stream processors using Cyberlink’s PowerDirector software. According to ATI, a Radeon HD 4800-series graphics chip can transcode one hour of 1080p video in 32 minutes, whereas it takes 9 hours 54 minutes to do the same task using Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz) central processing unit, 19 times faster.

We have just discussed theoretical aspects of the new ATI Radeon HD 4800 series. It is high time we got to real products and introduced to you an ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card from Power Color.