'Video Immersion II' - ATi's Strength In Video
There is not much to say to 'Video Immersion II'. So far ATi has been able to show the competition how digital video playback should look and Radeon 8500 is going to follow this tradition. The new chip will come with hardware accelerated MPEG2-decoding, motion compensation and iDCT for top-notch DVD-playback as well as MPEG2-recording. 'Video Immersion II' comes with an improved de-interlacing algorithm and new frame rate conversion techniques to improve sharpness and avoid jittering. Radeon 8500 will also support high quality HDTV. ATi's test samples were unfortunately also unable to do any video playback, so we were unable to test this feature as well.
And The Rest
Let me quickly list the remaining details of Radeon 8500:
- .15 micron process, 60 million transistors
- AGP 4x and 2x support
- Optimized for Pentium 4's SSE2 as well as Athlon's 3Dnow!
- 400 MHz DAC
- 165 MHz TDMS transmitter
- Default core clock 250 MHz
- Default Memory Clock 275 MHz, 8,800 MB/s bandwidth
- Default Amount of Memory 64 MB
- 128-bit 2D-engine
- 8-bit stencil buffer
- Priority buffers
- Motion blur and depth of field
- Point sampled, bilinear, trilinear and 16:1 anisotropic filtering
- 3D texturing, volume texture compression
- DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.3 support
- integrated TV-out, RAMDAC, TMDS-transmitter
Unfortunately ATi would not supply us with data about the power consumption of the chip or its die size. However, it seems as if the chip is very fully packed, since ATi was not able to find space enough for a second RAMDAC as required by HydraVision.
