ATI Stream | Universal Video Decoder 2.0
ATI Stream
The motherboard chipset has an embedded GPU (IGP) which is ATI Stream compatible. In current day and age there is more to GPUs than just playing games. More and more non-gaming related features can and are being offloaded to the GPU. Roughly a year ago ATI introduced ATI Stream. This is a software layer that allows software developers to 'speak' with the GPU and have it process data using your graphics card. This really is the most simple & basic description I can give it.
Now I'd like to point you towards one function you should all do with your GPU when it's doing nothing.
Folding@Home using the ATI Radeon series 4000 GPU
Folding at Home is a project where you can have your GPU or CPU (when the PC is not used) help out in solving diseases by folding proteins. Over the past 12 months a lot of progress has been made between the two parties involved. And right now there is a GPU folding client available that works with Radeon 4000 series graphics processors. It is ATI Stream based, meaning that all Stream ready GPUs can start folding.
Guru3D team is ranking in the Folding@Home top 80, yes... I'm very proud of our guys crunching these numbers, especially since there are tens of thousands of other teams. The client is out, if possible please join team Guru3D and let's fold away some nasty stuff. The good thing is, you won't even notice that it's running.
Our Folding@Home info can be found here:
Our Guru3D team number is 69411 and if you decide to purchase a 4000 series product, guys, promise me you'll use it to fold for us. By making this move my dear friends, there are now 70 million GPUs available to compute the biggest mysteries in diseases and illnesses. Again, let's make Team Guru3D the biggest one available guys, join our team.
Universal Video Decoder 2.0
Always worth a mention is UVD, short for Universal Video Decoder. With proper 3rd party software like WinDVD or PowerDVD you can enable support for UVD 2.0 which provides hardware acceleration of H.264 and VC-1 high definition video formats used by Blu-ray and HD DVD. The video processor allows the GPU to apply hardware acceleration and video processing functions while keeping power consumption & CPU utilization low.
You will have sheer decoding precision on the Radeon 4000 series. Low CPU utilization whilst scoring maximum image quality. One improvement has been made as well; you can now for example upscale your 1920x1080 streams fine to a 2560x1600 sized monitor (no more black borders).
New in the GPU architecture of the series 4000 is an updated video engine. It's not much different opposed to the old UVD engine, yet has two new additions for post-processing, decoding and enhancing video streams. Dual stream decoding is one of the new features. For example, if you playback a Blu-ray movie and simultaneously want to see a director's commentary (guided by video) you can now look at both the movie and in a smaller screen see the additional content (like picture-in-picture). Obviously this is Blu-ray 2.0 compatibility here, and the additional content is an actual feature of the movie. But definitely fun to see.
A new feature also is Dynamic Contrast Enhancement which was introduced by team green last year.
With the embedded Radeon HD 4200 GPU also comes the complete Avivo array of functionality
It does pretty much what the name says; Dynamic Contrast Enhancement technology will improve the contrast ratios in videos in real-time on the fly. It's a bit of a trivial thing to do, as there are certain situations where you do not want your contrast increased. Think for example a scary thriller, dark environment... and all of a sudden your trees light up. So with that in mind; the implementation has been done very delicately. It does work pretty well, but personally I'd rather tweak the contrast ratio myself and leave it at that. Another feature is Dynamic Color Enhancement. It's pretty much a color tone enhancement feature and will slightly enforce a color correction where it's needed. We'll show you that in a bit as I quite like this feature; it makes certain aspects of a movie a little more vivid.
Some like them, others hate these features. I say it's good to have choices and anything that can enhance image quality is nice to have in my book. Directly tied to the UVD engine is obviously also sound. AMD's Radeon series 4000 cards have a feature that the competition does not have. It can pass lossless sound directly through the HDMI connector. This has been upgraded as it's now possible to have 7.1 channel lossless sound, meaning DTS-ES and all other formats have now become a reality. A very nice move indeed as that distance between the living room and your PC is getting smaller each year. Yours truly for example has a nice Onkyo receiver which I connect HDMI to. This receiver will take those 7.1 channel sounds with a lot of interest, process them, and then pass through the HDMI content itself to the HD television. All that over just one HDMI cable.
Fantastic if you are watching a Blu-ray movie, simply connect an HDMI cable to your HDTV for PCM sound, or connect it through a TrueHD/Dolby HD receiver and get that sound going on through that receiver of yours. All with one simple cable.
Again - mind you that to be able to playback high-def content you'll still need WinDVD or PowerDVD, an HD source (Blu-ray player) and an HDCP monitor or television.
For those interested in MKV / x.264 GPU based content acceleration, playback and image quality enhancements, please read this guide we have written. We spotted this lovely little free application to manage this.
Here's an example of that, a 1080p MKV movie being accelerated and enhanced over the embedded motherboard GPU, observe processor load please.
MKV x.264 1080P - Complex Image Sharpening and 16-235 -> 0-255 shaders activated in MP Classic HT edition -- no frames dropped, yet granted it's borderline pushing close to the maximum of shader processor capability.
