Working on Two Fronts: ATi's Radeon VE Handles Two Monitors

MPEG And DVD Functions

In contrast to its competitors, the Radeon chip series possesses excellent features for displaying DVD and MPEG videos. Motion Compensation and IDCT (inverse discreet cosine transformation) effectively ease the strain on the system's CPU. Even at low rate frequencies (below a CPU rate of 500 MHz), MPEG or DVD material can be displayed without jerkiness. In the case of the GeForce2 MX or the G450, on the other hand, a faster processor is required to do the job of making up for this shortcoming.

Recording is an entirely different story - in video signal capture, a powerful processor is indispensable. MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 encoding still has to go the usual route - and the result is long computer sessions.

De-Interlacing: Problems With Your Stock Ticker?

Any financial information buff has already encountered the problem. If you have a data source in video format, running text often displayed chopped up. The problem - the interlacing of separate parts of the image. ATi uses a system called adaptive de-interlacing to try and get this problem under control. The results are fit to be seen:

As previously mentioned, the choppiness in running text displays is only obvious when using video sources - Java applets are not affected by this. We would still like to mention that jerkiness when displaying running video text cannot be entirely avoided in some application situations, as in the case of stock tickers. One possible cause might also be a sluggish TFT display.