ATI Radeon™ HD 3450 - Video Review Guide 4
©2007 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., AMD, The AMD arrow, Athlon, ATI, the ATI logo, Avivo,
Catalyst, The Ultimate Visual Experience and Radeon are trademarks of Advanced Micro
Devices, Inc. Features, pricing, availability and specifications may vary by product model and
are subject to change without notice. Products may not be exactly as shown. Not all features
may be implemented by all manufacturers.
Unified Video Decoder (UVD) To enable the largest number of consumers to playback HD content on their PCs,
from thin notebooks to entry-level PCs, AMD introduced the Unified Video Decoder,
or UVD. Initially featured on the ATI Radeon™ HD 2400 series, ATI Radeon™ HD
2600 series, ATI Mobility Radeon ™ HD 2300, ATI Mobility Radeon ™ HD 2400 and
the ATI Mobility Radeon ™ HD 2400 XT, UVD is a dedicated video decoding block that
facilitates the full, bit accurate, decoding process of VC-1 or H.264/AVC encoded
video. The entire range of ATI Radeon™ HD 3000 series desktop GPUs now feature
UVD with further processing improvements.
By utilizing dedicated hardware for the decoding of VC-1 and H.264 encoded video,
the CPU is alleviated from the decoding process and the graphics pipeline and CPU
cycles are freed up. The decreased drain on system power is particularly beneficial in
notebooks, where HD playback processing on the GPU places a lesser burden on the
battery life. Less overall heat is produced, resulting in a quieter system as fans are
not required to spin as fast and move as much air to dissipate the heat.
Processing of HD video requires large amounts of memory bandwidth. The initial
implementation of UVD on the ATI RadeonTM HD 2000 series had restrictions
dependant on the available memory bandwidth on a given board. The net result was,
at launch, the lowest bandwidth ATI RadeonTM HD 2400 PRO solutions targeted
playback of all HD content at 720p pixel resolutions. If the desktop resolution was
set any higher than 720p, then HD video decoding would fall-back to software in
order to save GPU bandwidth.
Subsequent Catalyst™ software updates have improved the situation such that VC-1
and H.264 content encoded in 1080p will play back using UVD at desktop resolutions
as high as 1920x1200 (higher than 1080p), however 1080i VC-1 and H.264/AVC as
well as HD MPEG-2 content still fall-back to fully software based decoding.
The ATI RadeonTM HD 3000 series of graphics processors features improvements to
the UVD engine that both reduce CPU utilization under HD decode and also improve
memory bandwidth utilization in order to maintain hardware HD decoding at higher
resolutions. The net result is that even the DDR2 equipped ATI Radeon™ HD 3450
will facilitate hardware decoding of 1080p and 1080i VC-1 and H.264/AVC encoded
content at 1920x1200 / 1080p desktop resolutions.
HDCP Support The advent of new HD optical discs, such as Blu-rayTM and HD DVD, as well as digital
cable on PCs, mandates certain requirements to playback protected content at HD
resolutions. Certain technology licensing specifications mandate that these new
technologies comply with content protection mechanisms. In particular, when stored
on Blu-rayTM and HD-DVD discs, protected content may only be displayed at HD
resolutions if HDCP is supported on both the PC and the monitor.