The Video Pipeline for All-In-Wonder, from TV to TV

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In logical terms, it's easy to split up the hardware on the All-In-Wonder X800 XT and describe its video pipeline. Before I do so, the All-In-Wonder X800 XT is just that, an X800 XT. It changes the 3D hardware not one iota, preserving all that's great and good about ATI's latest graphics processing architecture. If you want to know about the GPU in more detail, poke a browser tab at this URL.

3D aside, it goes a little something like this.

A new tuner can

Whereas other All-In-Wonder hardware in the past has sported a Philips tuner can (the tuner assembly), the X800 XT AIW sports a Microtune 2050 silicon tuner. The MT2050 is a full-presentation tuner for the Theater 200 media processor on the AIW. By full-presentation tuner, I mean it implements an entire RF (radio frequency) tuner and amplifier in the chip (and demod for a Theater 200, with demod done on-chip with a 550 PRO), to feed to the Theater 200.

The MT2050's main benefit over the Philips can, for the X800 XT AIW, are size-related. It's much much smaller than the old Philips hardware, giving ATI more board space to play with, much more backplane space to utilise for other connections. It's articulated in the reviewer's guide for X800 XT AIW best: "Both VGA and DVI connectors are available on the bracket of the card, which was not previously possible. In fact, without the new tuner it may have not even been possible to make the ALL-IN-WONDER X800 XT without significantly lowering 3D gaming performance."

There are also power savings to be had, the Microtune tuner leeching less from the power circuitry on the board than the old Philips. That's not to say the power draw from the added AIW hardware is enough to leave the existing X800 XT power circuitry intact, though. More on that shortly.

The Microtune 2050 then passes the RF video through its own demodulation hardware, then outputs the demodulated feed to the Theater 200 IC. This is different from the latest Theater 550 which does the demod and the Microtune just presents the base RF.

ATI Theater 200

ATI's Theater 200 chip takes the feed from the Microtune, regardless of whether that turns out to be an FM radio feed or TV, and that signal is decoded and cleaned up using a variety of methods. If it's analogue TV, it's passed through the 200's comb filter which splits the signal up into the black and white (luma) and colour (chroma) components. The type of comb filter implemented by the Theater 200 is a 2D adaptive filter, that works best on fast moving images.

More video processing hardware on the 200 then cleans up the image after splitting, possibly converting from interlaced frames to progressive (all the scanlines are drawn per frame, rather than half) if needed. Finally, it's passed through the 200's video engine which spits out raw video data.

The process is much the same for all other types of video, before the 200 presents it to the GPU via the VIP. The VIP is the interconnect between the 200 and the GPU. The 200 can handle much more than just analogue TV feeds from an antenna, capturing and processing video from S-Video, composite and component inputs (with spare processing power for more).

Output can be via S-Video, composite and for the first time on an All-In-Wonder product, RGB SCART, via a helper chip. Audio wise, the 200 can handle digital and analogue audio streams, demuxing audio from a TV feed with ease and processing digital audio with passthrough if needed.

Output so you can see it

The 200 passes processed video streams (correction: not MPEG-2 as I'd first asserted, but CCIR656 encoded video) to the GPU for display with the audio pushed out to your audio hardware. If you're using the All-In-Wonder as a replacement tuner for your TV, the hardware can output back out to TV using a number of methods, including the aforementioned RGB SCART (passed to a companion processor, more on which soon), and of course you can display everything on your monitor. I'll show you the connection options soon.

So there you have it, a short three-stage video pipeline using dedicated processing hardware at each stage, from the Microtune, into the 200 and then out to the GPU. All the scaling and deinterlacing is done on the GPU in recent All-In-Wonder hardware, putting the processed video output from the 200 wherever you want it.

Let's see how the hardware manifests itself.

[Pages]
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   [1]· Introduction
   [2]· The Video Pipeline for All-In-Wonder, from TV to TV
   [3]· ATI's Radeon X800 XT All-In-Wonder
   [4]· Video Quality and Performance
   [5]· System Setup and Notes
   [6]· 3D Performance
   [7]· Thoughts
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