ATI HAS 5.13 Avivo drivers in beta. We had a chance to play with them and to confirm that it indeed has something interesting to offer. The new 5.13 Avivo driver comes with Avivo video converter. It's a cool software codec that comes with 5.13 driver and works on the Radeon X1000 generation of cards. It basically encodes video files to various output formats. The only thing is that it can do it three to five times faster than any other codec.
The new 5.13 driver is smashing Nvidia in HQV video benchmark and you can clearly see that ATI R520 based card can process DVD quality video at much better quality than Nvidia G70 based hardware. ATI managed to score 108 in HQV benchmark while Nvidia scores 58 only, not that much. ATI chap compared the quality of R520 DVD playback with the score that you will get from super high end and expensive Denon DVD player.
We also had a chance to whiteness the transcoding head to head benchmark where ATI H.264 encoder managed to do the job three times faster than Nero software based H.264 encoder.
You can output the files to H.264/Mpeg 4 for Apple Ipod, H.264/Mpeg 4 for Play station portable, Creative PCM and its WMV9 is supported, Creative Zen with Mpeg 2/4 is supported and DVD players supporting MPEG 2 / Divx of course. So whatever you want to transcode can be done three to even five times faster. The Rx5xx cards have a chance to become industry standard for all the pirates who likes to make transcode DVDs to another format.
The 5.13 driver will offer hardware H.264 acceleration. You need Radeon X1K based card, 5.13 drivers and Cyberlink H.264 Decoder and you are good to go. If you have X1800 based card you will be able to play all files all the way up to 1080P. If you own midrange X1600 card you will be able to play all up to 720P, and X1300 based cards will be able to play 480P/576P files. A High end PC can cope with 720P but I have a massive frame drops when I want to play 1080P on a Pentium M 2.0GHz or Athlon FX 57 CPU.
We will play with this driver in next few days and we will let you know what we think of it. We expect that this driver should be available on ATI's web site in upcoming days and it will be available before Yule. µ