ATI HD 4670 512MB GDDR3 Video Card Review

AVIVO HD: The Real Deal

Even though we have reviewed quite a few ATI graphics cards which support AVIVO HD technology, we have never really touched upon its benefits. Since this card can caters to the HTPC crowd as much as it does towards the casual gamer crowd, we figured now would be as good a time as any to touch upon the benefits.

First of all, AVIVO HD (and its accompanying UVD 2) offers hardware decoding of high definition video streams which will minimize load on your CPU and thus provide smoother playback. What many people have to remember is that the HD 4670`s closest competitor (the Nvidia 9500GT) is based on Nvidia’s older technology and thus only supports Purevideo 2. This means that the 9500GT offers full H.264 decoding and AACS decryption but offloads decoding of VC-1 video streams to the CPU. Meanwhile, all of the cards in ATI’s lineup from the lowest HD 3600-series all the way up to the HD 4800-series support full VC-1 and H.264 hardware decoding. Just remember, you need software which supports hardware decoding such as Cyberlink’s PowerDVD.

Let’s take a look at what is offered in the Catalyst Control Center when it comes to AVIVO options


When you first enter the AVIVO portion of the CCC, you have a quick-select box which will give you various preset video settings so you won’t have to fiddle around with too many settings to get your desired color levels. However, for those of you with a finer taste for the perfect picture, ATI has more for you.

In the Basic Color section you have all of the, brightness, contrast, tint and saturation controls at your fingertips. There is also a Use Application Settings which will cause any game or software-specific color profiles to override the settings you choose in this section.


ATI also includes and area with finer color adjustments for skin tone and color vibrancy. Normally, we don’t dare touch these settings but since some movies tend to have different color parameters than others, they come in handy every now and then.

In the Basic Quality section, you are able to control the deinterlacing mode used in videos. While we normally recommend you keep this at its default value, when watching movies on a high resolution screen, I personally set it to Vector Adaptive and Pulldown Dection.


The two final options you have here are Theatre Mode and All Settings. In Theatre Mode, you are able to scale the video output across multiple displays while the All Settings holds….well...all the settings from the previous sections without their accompanying thumbnail preview.


HD Decoding Performance

In order to show you the advantages of hardware decoding, we ran two small tests using downloaded 1080P video files in Quicktime format. While these “benchmarks” don’t represent a worst-case scenario as you would see with a high bitstream Blu-Ray movie, they do give you a good idea of why you would want your video card doing the decoding rather than pawning it off on your processor.

Both videos were run in Cyberlink’s PowerDVD 8 Ultra on a system consisting of an Intel Q9300 processor at 2.5Ghz and 4Gb of DDR2 ram.


Even with a quad core processor, a regular 1080P video like the ones seen above can use a significant amount of processing power. We saw over 20% at peak in both instances while using either Nvidia’s Purevideo or ATI’s UVD showed us that hardware decoding can result in the processor sitting almost completely idle most of the time. Looking at this it is easy to see why we recommend using a discrete graphics card along with a good software player which supports hardware decoding.