Join the AV club
ATI's AIW line already leads the consumer graphics industry in AV and PVR functionality, and ATI hasn't made any drastic changes in that respect. However, ATI has managed to sneak in a few changes to keep this latest AIW fresh, and also to fully exploit the power of the Radeon 9700 Pro GPU. What kind of tinkering has ATI done?

• A new dongle - Because there's only so much room on the back of a PCI slot, ATI's AIW products have always relied on a dongle to provide their dizzying array of AV input and output ports. A special component output compatible with HDTVs is new for the AIW 9700 Pro, which supports high-definition resolutions of 480i/p, 720p, and 1080i. The new dongle is red, too, which is a snazzy improvement over previous purple dongles. The older dongle is still available if you're not equipped with a new high definition set, but the new HDTV dongle won't work with older AIW products.

  Finite PCI back plate space has limited the multi-monitor functionality of AIW cards in the past, and that continues to be the case with the AIW 9700 Pro. You can run a single DVI or VGA monitor, but that's it. The only way to get multiple monitors running is to have one of them be a TV, and who wants to resort to a TV for anything other than video playback? I was hoping the new dongle would move more AV components off the PCI back plate to free up room for two monitor outputs, or that ATI would manage to work something else out for the multi-monitor crowd, but it wasn't meant to be.

• VideoSoap and MPEG2 acceleration - VideoSoap is a new video filtering algorithm which uses the AIW 9700 Pro's pixel shaders to clean up video streams before they're compressed. "Cleaner" video streams are easier to compress, so ATI is able to leverage better quality and a smaller file size at the same time.

  ATI has also managed to get the AIW 9700 Pro to do some of the work encoding both MPEG2 and their proprietary .VCR format. This hardware acceleration yields a claimed 10-20% savings in CPU utilization; that's not exactly trivial, especially if you want to free up some CPU time for your Folding@Home client. Just about every new graphics card these days can accelerate the MPEG decoding process, but the AIW 9700 Pro is the first to offload some of the encoding burden onto the GPU.

  What's especially neat about the VideoSoap/hardware acceleration combo is that ATI's software lets you mix and match up to four different filters and see just how much of the GPU you're using with each.

• Philips MK3 tuner - The tuner on the AIW 9700 Pro was built specifically for ATI by Philips, and it's the same one you'll find in the AIW Radeon 8500 128MB. The AIW Radeon 8500DV actually featured a silicon-based, digital tuner, but it's the only ATI product to do so. The AIW 9700 Pro's tuner isn't silicon-based, or digital, but you'll still find it in a familiar position right on the card's PCB.

• Rage Theatre 200 - ATI's Rage Theatre chip gets an update for the AIW 9700 Pro since all of the old Rage Theatre chips' features are now found in ATI's GPUs. The new Rage Theatre's ADCs (analog-to-digital converters) are 12-bit, which are the highest available on consumer graphics products. This high bit rate is especially important since the AIW 9700 Pro doesn't feature the Firewire ports of the AIW Radeon 8500DV, or any digital audio ports.

The hardware changes ATI is making with the AIW 9700 Pro are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but they still set a pretty high standard for competitors to match. The only step down is the elimination of the AIW Radeon 8500DV's Firewire ports and digital tuner, but I can live without both, especially with more motherboards featuring Firewire ports.

Software bundle
The software provided with ATI's AIW products has generally been very good, with much of it actually developed in-house by ATI. With the AIW 9700 Pro, ATI has tweaked its own software a little and changed the bundle around. What's different?

• MultiMedia Center 8.0 - ATI's own AIW software suite gets an update for the AIW 9700 Pro, but the actual changes appear to be minimal. ATI is offering up a few new GUI skins, and some improved file management tools to keep your hard drive from getting filled too quickly. There's also a new "one-touch" scheduling component of MMC's PVR software, which lets you record on a weekly, weekday, or monthly basis, but flexibility still falls far behind what's offered by something like a TiVo.

  Perhaps MMC's most interesting enhancement is mulTView, which supports a second TV tuner via a TV Wonder PCI card. MMC 8.0 will let you watch two different programs with picture-in-picture, or even record one program while watching another on a different channel. MulTView is pretty cool, especially for keeping track of the score in one game while you watch another, or while your better half watches something she wants to watch.

• Pinnacle Studio 8 SE - To satisfy your video editing needs, ATI is bundling Pinnacle Studio 8 SE with the AIW 9700 Pro. This is a full-featured version of Pinnacle Studio 8 with a number of ATI-specific enhancements that should take advantage of the Radeon 9700 Pro's pixel-pushing muscle. Pinnacle Studio 8, without ATI's "SE" enhancements, retails for $99; ATI isn't exactly skimping on software.

• Remote Wonder SDK - ATI hasn't changed its Remote Wonder RF remote, but it doesn't really need to. The Remote Wonder is already a fantastic product, and it's even sold on its own now. On the software front, ATI has released a few updates that let you use the Remote Wonder with programs like Winamp. More significantly, ATI has also released a Remote Wonder SDK, which should allow developers and even individuals to vastly increase the level of support the Remote Wonder has in various applications.

TV listings are still provided by Gemstar's Guide+ software, which lets you download schedules and browse them offline. Gemstar itself has been having some financial difficulties, and is subject to being delisted from the Nasdaq for failing to provide audited second quarter results. If Gemstar goes under, AIW users could be screwed, though I'm sure ATI has some sort of contingency plan in place that would replace Guide+ if necessary.