ATI's All-In-Wonder X1900 Performance And DVD Decoding Quality

Introduction

ATI is no-doubt enjoying the limelight lately with the release of the X1900, which is no surprise considering their new card puts ATI back in the lead over NVIDIA in the performance category. With some form of the 7800 GTX so long on the top of that list, it's kind of strange seeing an ATI card take its place, especially given the timing of the release and the short lifespan of the X1800 series. Now that ATI has these incredibly powerful cards available to consumers, we're interested to see how future games will put this card to good use.

ATI has been successful with their All-In-Wonder line of multimedia graphics cards, and have been good about making them available on a wide variety of their cards. We recently reviewed the AIW 2006 which was based on the X1300, and ATI have apparently wasted no time in coming out with an All-In-Wonder card based on their newest part, the X1900.

The All-In-Wonder X1900 is the latest thing from ATI and it promises the same quality (if not better) of video and multimedia features we've seen before, on a card with the highest in gaming performance. Until now, the X1800 XL All-In-Wonder was the most powerful version of this card, and we were impressed by its performance. However, the X1900 AIW will obviously be better for gaming, even if it's not quite as powerful as a stock X1900 XT.

Many of the multimedia/video features remain the same as the previous versions, so we will be touching briefly on each feature for those who aren't familiar with what the AIW offers. Because the GPU is clocked lower than a standard X1900, gaming performance will be something for us to look at, and we will be testing the AIW X1900 against a wide range of cards, including the standard X1900 XT and XTX. We've already reviewed a few different All-In-Wonder graphics cards, but for this one, there will be a slight change of focus.

Video quality is something we sometimes take for granted when talking about digital video. Different DVD players can sometimes differ greatly in image quality, and these differences are not all subjective. We will be looking closely at how ATI's latest drivers handle digital video processing with a special HQV benchmark on this card, and we'll also be looking at how it compares to NVIDIA's decoding. There have been some changes by ATI which address some decoding problems in the past, and we're interested to see how well they've done. For now though, lets look at the All-In-Wonder X1900.