Avivo
From TPU Reference
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ATI's Avivo (codenamed "Clarity" and "Kaleidoscope") is a set of software that consists of several components for capturing, encoding, decoding, processing and displaying video content.
Capturing and Encoding content is typically done by ATI's "Theater" products, for example the Theater 550 Pro cards.
Customers will more often use the playback related features which are set to optimize the image quality of DVD and H.264 content, when used with supported software. Avivo will not make the quality of your DivX/XVid movies better.
At its launch, the image quality improvement was only about average, definitely not as good as NVIDIA's PureVideo improvements. ATI has been constantly making updates to their Avivo code, which is contained in the ATI Catalyst driver suite. A big update was launched with Catalyst 5.12, bringing H.264 decoding acceleration to ATI cards. Also included is a transcode utility that converts video data between formats, greatly accelerating the process by using GPU processing resources. H.264 decoding works by installing a decoder for Cyberlink's PowerDVD, which then automatically uses the GPU, when playing back a supported content format on supported hardware.
Avivo is only available for the ATI Radeon X1000 Series and up, because it requires Shader Model 3.0.
According to testing results of Beyond3D, the HQV DVD benchmark quality improved from 35 (Catalyst 5.9), to 103 (Catalyst 6.2), to 113 (Catalyst 6.3), out of a theoretical maximum of 130 points.
