Advanced Imaging and Video – this is how ATI defines its new brand, Avivo. ATI claims Avivo to be the new benchmark in PC visual experience. Whether or not it lives up to ATI’s claims and expectations will be seen in a short while, but for now, lets take a peek under the hood and see what makes it tick.

Avivo has been known by multiple names before and is all about the video (or display). Earlier, it was called Clarity and later Kaleidoscope, but ATI finally settled on a name that the company felt could create a wave in the industry. With that said, please welcome Avivo…

The process of capturing video is the first step towards displaying it, since the quality of the final display is decided right when the video is being captured.

The graphics card will first capture the video from the source; it will then encode it into a specified format and then store it. When you want to display the specified video, it’s first decoded, then processed by several enhancers to improve overall quality and ultimately displayed on the screen.

Here’s how the process works:

Credit: ATI

There are various components in your system that will cater to different aspects of the process. Your capture and encoding device would be your TV Tuner card while the decoding and display function is handled by the graphics card. During the encoding/decoding process, almost all of the CPU bandwidth is used up; therefore, if you want the fastest possible results, you should not run other applications simultaneously.

To further clarify, Avivo is more like a brand name that encompasses multiple technologies. There is no single product (at least not yet) that will do every process in the video path shown above. Instead, you will need multiple devices put together to give you that functionality, thus a fully Avivo enabled computer in your house will need to have a Theater Pro 550 card (for the capture and encode stage) and a R5xx based card with transcoding ability during the encoding stage as well as the last three stages of the video path, as mentioned earlier.

Without further ado, here’s the breakdown of each of the following stages and their relation to Avivo.

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