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AVIVO is a video platform ATI introduced with its R520-based line of GPUs. The platform is designed to enhance the quality and flexibility of ATI's current video capabilities. The platform involves hardware video decoding/encoding (H.264 or High Definition content inclusive), and a variety of tools to aid in both. AVIVO's video decoder automatically offloads supported video formats/codecs to the GPU to lower CPU usage. AVIVO's video encoding technology still predominantly utilizes the CPU, however future plans have been made to utilize the GPU for encoding as well. ATI has also released a transcoder software dubbed "ATI AVIVO Video Converter," which supports many formats and bitrates, this software relies on the CPU but has been locked for exclusive use with ATI's X1K series of GPUs. Software modifications have made it possible to use this tool on a more wide range of graphics adapters. ATI's AVIVO is a technology still under development and as such will be continually upgraded via ATI's Catalyst series of drivers.
[edit] Background
The GPU wars between ATI and NVIDIA have resulted in GPUs with ever increasing processing power. To parallel this increase in speed and power, both GPU makers needed to increase video quality as well, in 3D graphics applications the focus in increasing quality has mainly fallen on Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. However it has dawned upon both companies that video quality on the PC would need improvement as well and the current APIs provided both companies have not seen many improvements over a few generations of GPUs. Therefore, ATI decided to revamp its GPU's video processing capability with AVIVO, in order to compete with and outperform nVidia's current PureVideo API.
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