ATI Ups the PC Video Ante Again

by Jim Bray

ATI's latest high end video card brings incredible flexibility to your PC's desktop.

The $399 All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV combines gaming ability with multimedia, a TV tuner with PVR (personal video recorder) capabilities, DVD playback and plenty more.

There's even a remote control to work it.

The All-in-Wonder series has been around for years but this new card is easily the best yet.

It's not only the best gaming card I've used to date (though I must admit that my experience with heavy duty gaming cards is limited), but everything else seems to be as high end as its performance with passtimes aimed at providing "aimless thrills."

Available only in an AGP version, the card is powered by the Radeon 8500 GPU (graphics processing unit) which includes 64 megabytes of DDR (double data rate) memory. ATI says the new card takes advantage of its TRUFORM and SMARTSHADER technologies, which the company claims make possible photo realistic, real time 3D graphics and is capable of running 2048x1536 resolution. My monitor only goes up to 1600x1200, but even at that resolution games looked fabulous and ran really well.

And that's only the beginning. As with previous AIW's, the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV offers enough audio and video I/O's to choke a horse, but the new card even incorporates two IEEE1394 "Firewire" ports for connecting the latest generations of digital video equipment.

This takes the card squarely into the Professional category and though Firewire is still pretty new it's only a matter of time before this interface becomes widespread. In the meantime, I used the card's composite video and stereo audio inputs (which use conventional RCA jacks) to download a video segment from my VCR onto my hard drive, edit it and then stream it over the Web. It was cool.

To facilitate hookups, ATI includes a multi-connector thingy that connects to the video card at a single point but offers a plethora of A/V I/O's that can sit on the desktop where you need them. This means less messing about behind your PC, which is appreciated. This isn't exactly new for ATI, but it's improved and includes a vareity of inputs and outputs.

The card also comes with a new version of ATI's multimedia suite (V7.5) that offers you the aforementioned TV viewing as well as DVD, CD, VCD playback, a multimedia file player and "media library" organizer type of thing that helps you keep track of your digital multimedia files.

The TV quality (which includes a nifty new "transparent" feature) is very good, and it includes a 125 channel stereo tuner, TV on Demand PVR technology and GemStar's Guide Plus online TV guide that lets you point and click your programming choices. You can use this setup to pause live TV, record programs for later viewing and generally replace your VCR with your PC.

Which brings up the problem of PC fan noise. It's all very well and good to use your PC as a VCR, but if you're going to have it near your TV it's going to cause some noise pollution in the home theater.

Which is undoubtedly why ATI has thrown in a special remote control with the card, one that uses radio waves instead of infrared light to transmit signals. This lets you leave your PC in the home office (or wherever) and control it from your home theater/TV room.

Okay, you have to run a couple of long wires (you have to string cable to the PC and run audio/video out cables back to the TV), but it's still a mighty handy feature.

The remote interfaces with your PC via a USB receiver. It looks like a conventional audio/video remote, but it also incorporates mouse functions that make it suitable for PC use. I found it to be a tad ponderous as a mouse, but on the whole it works as advertised.

DVD playback quality, by the way, is excellent and you can output the Dolby Digital 5.1 sound to a decoder if you have one.

As if all that weren't enough, ATI also throws in versions of Ulead Video Studio 5 video editing software (though it could stand to be more user friendly) and Matchware Mediator 6 . Not only that, there's also Hydravision, which lets you access more than one monitor at a time.

Coming in 2002 is component video output, for really high resolution video on your TV.

And I'll bet that still won't be the end of nifty new stuff for these All-In-Wonders…

Jim Bray's technology columns are distributed by the TechnoFILE and Mochila Syndicates. Copyright Jim Bray.

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