ATI’s All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro graphics card

One reason ATI has been so successful is that, in spite of its market lead, it continues to improve the All-In-Wonder line. The last generation, the All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro, finally ensured that video capture capabilities did not come at the expense of 3D performance. Since then, ATI has released the 9800 Pro, offering up even greater 3D graphics power. Today, we’re looking at the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro, which brings ATI’s highest-performance graphics core to the All-In-Wonder line, and adds some AIW-specific features, as well. Let’s see what kind of toys ATI has to offer.

A look at the hardware
First, let’s check out the card itself.

The DVI connector is easy to identify, and obviously the coaxial jack is where you run your cable or antenna connection. The purple and black connectors are for video input and output, respectively. Incidentally, ATI includes a DVI-to-VGA adapter in the package, so you have the option using of either a CRT or LCD. Dual display capabilities, however, are limited to a VGA/DVI monitor and a TV output of some sort (either composite, S-Video or component).

It’s not immediately obvious from the picture, but the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro has the same R350 VPU and high-speed DDR memory as the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB, clocked at the same speeds as the Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. This means that from a 3D graphics standpoint, the All-In-Wonder card is every bit as capable as a “regular” 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro. ATI started this trend with the All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro, and now their flagship VPU is once again available as an All-In-Wonder model.

A brief aside to remind you of the high points of the R350: It’s a DirectX 9 compliant part with a 256-bit memory interface that gives it gobs of memory bandwidth (21.8GB/s). The chip’s F-buffer gives it the ability to run shader programs of unlimited length, rectifying one of the few shortcomings of its predecessor, the R300. The R350 is the latest example of a trend of ATI’s dominance in 3D graphics, and approximately six months after its release, it is still, by nearly all measures, the fastest consumer graphics chip on the market. Am I jogging your memory yet?

Because the core and memory speeds are identical, I won’t be looking at graphics performance in this article. If you want to read more about the R350 core, take a look at Damage’s excellent Radeon 9800 Pro review.

Though the R350 VPU handles the 3D graphics, when it comes to video decoding, the Theater 200 chip is the star of the show. With dual 12-bit analog-to-digital converters and adaptive comb filters, the Theater 200 is equipped to deal with composite, S-Video and component video. On the audio side of things, the Theater 200 is capable of decoding and digitizing stereo audio and “supports the major audio television broadcast standards used throughout the world” according to ATI. The Theater 200 enables the All-In-Wonder card to understand pretty much any video and/or audio standard you can throw at it, be it a broadcast signal or output from a VCR or DVD player.

The input and output hardware hasn’t changed since Geoff’s review of the All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro, so I’m borrowing a couple of pictures from his review.

The input block comes with a length of Velcro to secure it to a handy spot on your desk, and with a cable length of approximately five feet, you should be able to make the run back to your computer easily.

There are actually two output cables; you choose between them depending upon your output device. The black cable includes composite and S-Video out connectors, and the red cable has the three RCA jacks necessary for component output. The extra RCA jack on each cable is a coaxial S/PDIF connector which outputs digital audio for a surround sound receiver. Finally, the 1/8″ audio plug on each cable goes to the line input on a sound card to feed it analog audio.

The final major component of the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro’s package is the Remote Wonder, shown above, and the accompanying USB receiver. There are several things that make this piece a lot more special than the little black wafer that came with your TV. First, the remote not only controls key functions of ATI’s software like channel changing and volume, it will also act as a replacement for a mouse. Second, ATI has made an API available by which other developers can write plug-ins for the Remote Wonder, allowing it to control third-party applications. Plug-ins for Powerpoint and Winamp, for example, are included in the box.

The core Remote Wonder software allows users to assign various functions to certain remote keys, as well. The dialog above shows off some of the customizations for Windows itself, but you can also assign functions for any installed plug-ins, as well as for the core ATI applications like TV or DVD player.

Finally, the Remote Wonder uses radio frequencies to communicate with the PC, as opposed to the infrared transmissions of most remote controls, so the Remote Wonder doesn’t require line-of-sight to the receiver any more than a cordless phone requires line-of-sight to its base. There are limits, but in my experience the Remote Wonder functioned well through a couple of walls, anyway.

Other items found in the box include six-foot composite and S-Video cables, a “Y” adapter to ensure your machine has a power connector for the 9800 Pro card, and the aforementioned DVI-to-VGA adapter. Several CDs are included as well, and we’ll cover those shortly.

From a documentation standpoint, there is a small fold-out which documents the initial installation steps and shows where the various cables plug into the card and what they plug into, and an Installation and Setup User’s Guide which offers additional detail into the installation process.

The softer side of things
Now that we’ve looked at the hardware, let’s take a closer look at the software that comes with the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro.

Matchware Mediator 7

Meditor 7 is “the user-friendly, award-winning multimedia-authoring tool that allows you to easily drag and drop your way to interactive presentations.” That’s how the brochure in the box describes it, anyway. The program will save your presentations in HTML, Flash or its own Mediator format.

I spent some time playing with Mediator, but I never really got into it. The program has no tutorial or tour function that I could find, and the learning curve was steep enough that I lost interest before I figured out much of anything about the program.

Pinnacle Studio 8

The same could not be said of Pinnacle Studio 8, a video editing program included with the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro. This program covers every aspect of video editing, from video capture to splicing together clips and adding transitions and titling, to outputting the finished product onto DVD. The program is very intuitive and easy to understand, and a brief but comprehensive product tour shows you exactly what you need to start using the software. According to the splash screen, Pinnacle Studio has won eight Emmy awards. Any number of crap shows have managed to garner an Emmy, but is it possible to produce crap software that wins eight of ’em? I don’t think so.

Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls III
The final third-party software inclusion is Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls III. This game rules. Gamespot gave it an 8.7/10, and Dr. Evil gives it his “really damn sweet” award. I can say that because I spent more hours than I care to admit playing through this bad boy. The game is so frickin’ huge that the strategy guide looks like a Stephen King novel. ATI made a great choice for a game bundle with this one.

ATI Multimedia Center 8.5
It probably wouldn’t be overstating things to say that the secret to ATI’s success with the All-In-Wonder series is the Multimedia Center software. Don’t get me wrong; the hardware is important, but ATI has made it a priority to constantly improve the All-In-Wonder’s software, as well. The latest incarnation of that effort is version 8.5, which adds a new feature called EAZYLOOK (their caps, not mine, believe me). We’ll explore the EAZYLOOK feature in detail, but first let’s look at the Multimedia Center software as a whole.

ATI uses consistent “skins” for the MMC components, so they all look fairly similar. The skins also allow you to radically alter the look of the components without changing their functionality, similar to skins in WinAmp. Several pre-defined skins are included, so you can choose whichever one fits your taste.

By default, ATI MMC 8.5 loads a taskbar that allows you to launch its various components. Going in order down the taskbar, they are:

File Player
File Player is a multi-purpose application that will play a variety of media formats. Supported formats include MPEG, AVI, ASF, ATI’s Digital VCR format, as well as WAV, MIDI and MP3 audio. Notable features include the ability to zoom in on a portion of the screen (up to 8X) and pan around, an option to capture stills during video playback, and a scheduler to have files play back at a certain time. If you want to wake up to an MP3 or video clip rather than the wacky morning zoo, a simple wizard will set it up for you.

Video CD
I found the existence of a separate Video CD program interesting, as other products (WinDVD and PowerDVD come to mind) simply roll the ability to play VCDs into their DVD playback software. There aren’t a whole lot of options here, but the stills capture, zoom and scheduler from the File Player application make an appearance here, as well.

CD Audio
The CD Audio application supports all the features one would expect in a CD app, including shuffle, repeat and intro play. If you have an Internet connection, the program can also query CDDB (compact disc database) to retrieve artist and track listing information for the disc and display it during playback. As with the other apps, you can also schedule CD playback for a later time.

DVD
The DVD player application has everything you’d expect in a component DVD player and then some. For example, you can set first and second choices for a preferred playback language, and if that language is available, it will be selected automatically. You also have the ability to set the playback aspect ratio on a disc-by-disc basis, saving your preferences for later viewings. Bookmarks (where the player remembers where you stopped on a disc, and picks up from there the next time it’s inserted) are available, and the number of bookmarks and their expiration time in days is user-configurable. Like the other applications, still capture and program scheduling are available here, too.

TV and TV Listings
Though these are technically two different applications, they are so intertwined that I’ll talk about them together. TV is, of course, the television viewer component of MMC, and it offers a lot of features you won’t find on any regular television. The most obvious of these is the TV Listings screen, which is a program guide called GUIDE Plus+, licensed from Gemstar. I’m going to use ATI’s naming convention and just call it TV Listings, however, because between the all caps and the inexplicable “double plus” the name GUIDE Plus+ annoys the crap out of me.

I had to shrink the window to fit it, of course, but you get the idea. The black box in the upper left corner actually displays live TV when you’re in the application. Below that are two large blocks for advertisements—if this annoys you, remember that the program guide data is a free download, and doesn’t require a monthly service fee a la TiVo.

The rest of the screen is devoted to the program listings themselves. At the top is an area for the description of the highlighted program. Below that are buttons for every sort option you could think of, and a few more besides. In addition to the station/time grid shown, you can get an alphabetical listing of every program stored in the guide, as well as a listing of every actor and the shows in which they appear. If that isn’t enough for you, take a look at the search dialog:

You can build searches consisting of any combination of the criteria shown, including exclusions (i.e. “not on A&E or BRAVO” for example). If you whip up a search you’re particularly proud of, you can save it for later, too. Impressive.

To view a program that’s currently airing, simply click it in the listing area. If the program will be airing in the future, you can schedule it for recording by right-clicking it and choosing Record. If you want to view the description, just click the program to select it. Here, we run into our first annoyance with the TV Listings app, because selecting or even right-clicking on any program changes the live viewing window to that program. The change occurs even if the program isn’t actually on yet; the viewing window simply displays a black screen with the words “Not Currently Showing.” This behavior made little sense to me. Both my digital cable guide and the guide on my TiVo let me read all about other programs while continuing to watch the channel I last selected.

Also, although the TV Listings app has an excellent array of options for finding a program to record, it doesn’t have the option of recording all instances of a particular program, or even scheduling a program to be recorded, say, every weeknight at 10:30PM. The TV Listings app is a good start, but it has a ways to go before it approaches the feature set of a TiVo.

The TV application itself has a couple of interesting features, as well. First off, the application actually supports all of the All-In-Wonder’s inputs, so you can not only watch broadcast TV, you can also watch video from the composite or S-Video inputs. Assuming you are watching broadcast TV, however, one option that may interest you is the Channel Surf feature. Click a button on the control panel, and you get a window like this:

The program flips rapidly between channels and takes a screenshot of each one, overlaying the channel number and label to help you identify what’s on. Double-clicking on one of the small screenshots change to that channel. While this is an interesting feature, I’m not sure how much use it will see; why try to guess what’s on from a screenshot (that may be of a commercial) when you have a complete program guide built in?

Other unique features (of questionable usefulness) are HOTWORDS and TV Magazine. Both of these revolve around closed captioning. The former lets you specify one or more words for the program to watch for in closed captioning data; if the words are spotted, a variety of actions can be taken, from restoring the TV application from a minimized state to enabling the TV Magazine feature. TV Magazine, on the other hand, transcribes closed captioning text into a file, optionally capturing up to four images per page of CC text. I suppose there are certain isolated instances where this would be useful, but I can’t imagine either of these features will be used regularly by most consumers.

There are two recording features available with the TV application. Both record audio and video, but they are distinguished by their intended purposes. First is the Personal Video Recorder function, which simply records either for a specified length of time or until the end of the current program. Programs can be recorded in a variety of formats, from MPEG to AVI to ATI’s own VCR format.

An interesting option here is ATI’s Video Soap, which processes video as it’s being recorded to help clean up the signal. When Geoff looked at this feature in his All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro article, it made a lot of difference in his video signal. Whenever I tried the preview feature, however, I couldn’t see any difference between the processed signal versus the unprocessed version. I’m not sure why there was such a disparity; perhaps it’s those Canadian radio waves. I hear the government requires that all broadcasts look like a maple leaf when viewed on an oscilloscope.

The second recording option is called TV-ON-DEMAND (all these caps are ATI’s, I swear). This recording function is intended to be more transient, enabling you to pause live TV (to take a phone call, for example) and then pick up where you left off. You can rewind and fast forward through the recorded portion, which lets you skip commercials to “catch up” to live TV more quickly.

TiVo users will be very familiar with this feature, but again, TiVo takes it a step further compared to the All-In-Wonder. TiVo is constantly recording live TV, up to a half hour back, so not only can you pause live TV to take care of other business, you can also rewind something you’ve just seen (such as that football call that you’re just sure the ref screwed up) and watch it over and over again if you like. Because of TV-ON-DEMAND’s on/off nature, this isn’t really possible with the All-In-Wonder.

One final feature of the TV software is called mulTView. This lets you install a TV WONDER PCI card to add Picture In Picture or Picture outside Picture (two windows) capability.

Other cool features
A couple of features need to be covered separately, because they apply to multiple applications in the MMC suite. They are THRUVIEW and EAZYLOOK.

THRUVIEW
THRUVIEW isn’t a new feature in MMC 8.5, but it’s unique enough that it deserves a mention anyway. Basically, it gives you the option of displaying translucent live video over the desktop, either on the whole desktop or in a window. It’s difficult to describe, but once you see it you’ll know what I mean:

Funky, eh? I’m not sure I could either watch it or work over (under? through?) it for very long without making myself sick, but hey, that’s just me. A systray icon lets you adjust the transparency level to your liking.

EAZYLOOK
Unlike THRUVIEW, EAZYLOOK is a brand-new addition to the MMC 8.5 release. Essentially, it’s a full-screen interface for the TV, DVD and File Player applications that is designed to be controlled with the Remote Wonder, and is also designed to be viewable over a regular TV. The idea here is that you can sit back on your couch and manipulate things with the Remote Wonder without having to jump up and run for the keyboard and mouse.

It’s not immediately obvious from the screenshot, but the display at the bottom is transparent and allows the video underneath to show through. I had to pause the video to take this picture, so that’s why you see the icon on the right-hand side of the image. The actual displays are more impressive than a screenshot shows; they expand up from the bottom, fade in and out, and do other cool stuff to make the effect very polished and nice-looking.

Though EAZYLOOK is meant to be viewed on a television set, don’t think that it will transform your machine into the perfect home theater PC. For basic DVD or TV viewing, EAZYLOOK is fine, but it won’t enable you to use a television as your only monitor. Sooner or later, you’re going to want to do something that EAZYLOOK can’t handle, and then it’s back to the Windows desktop.

One glaring example of this reality is the EAZYLOOK version of the TV app. The application does technically have access to the program guide data, but there is no option to view the guide data in grid form. You can only use the cursor keys to skip up and down the channels and back and forth across time slots, viewing one program at a time. This program guide version of “Hunt the Wumpus” (bonus points if you get the reference) is so frustrating as to be unusable. This shortcoming really detracts from watching TV on EAZYLOOK. TiVo and my digital cable box can do this right, so why can’t the All-In-Wonder?

There are a couple of possible explanations. One is that EAZYLOOK is brand new for this release, so consider it EAZYLOOK 1.0. If it’s just a case of “we’re working on it,” then I’m fine with that; let me know when it’s done. On the other hand, the large advertisements on the TV Listings screen make me wonder if perhaps the ads are a part of ATI’s licensing deal with Gemstar. If that’s the case, we might never see a proper program guide under EAZYLOOK, and that would really suck. Time will tell. One further indication of EAZYLOOK’s 1.0 status is a lack of support for mulTView in this release.

One final frustration with EAZYLOOK has to do with the Remote Wonder. The controls on the remote have that “learning remote” feel to them. By that, I mean that rather than the buttons being labeled with specific purposes, many of them are generic. Six of them, for example, are just labeled A through F. The problem with such a design is that it’s difficult to remember what the buttons do in a given app. ATI has tried to mitigate this problem with an online help system. Press the “Web” button when in EAZYLOOK, and a help window appears. Then press a button, and the window will tell you that button’s function (if it has one).

I’ll give ATI bonus points for effort, but the obvious problem with this arrangement is that it’s backwards. Given the unlabeled buttons, how many times do you think you’d say to yourself, “I wonder what this button does?” Now, how many times would you say to yourself, “Which one of these thirty buttons (if any) controls feature XXX?” Get the point? With the online help system, you have to mash buttons randomly until you find the one you want. Unless none of the buttons control the feature you’re looking for, in which case you 1) mash them all, 2) mutter “Crap” under your breath, and 3) go to the keyboard to do what you were trying to do with the remote.

I should point out that the MMC User’s Guide has a listing of the button functions for all supported EAZYLOOK apps. On the other hand, the listing is fourteen pages long, which makes it unwieldy. And who wants to have to thumb through a manual to look up a function on a remote?

Overall, I think the EAZYLOOK feature is a welcome addition to ATI’s software package. It’s a good first effort, and one hopes it will get better with time.

Conclusions
The All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro is the latest step in the evolution of ATI’s video-capable line, and it’s a worthy successor to the All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro. It sounds cliché, but the AIW 9800 Pro really is a one-stop video card solution, excelling at everything from 3D graphics to TV viewing to video capture. The very capable hardware is aided by a fantastic software bundle that ATI is obviously committed to improving.

So the obvious question is: should you buy one? If you’re in the market for a Radeon 9800 Pro and you’re even slightly interested in digital video, give the AIW 9800 Pro a hard look. Its street price is currently about $80 more than the Radeon 9800 Pro, and for what you get, that’s a steal. There’s the Remote Wonder, the Pinnacle Studio software, the TV tuner and video-in/video-out hardware… the list goes on. The only caveat I’d offer is: beware if dual monitor support is important to you, because this is one feature the Radeon 9800 Pro has over the All-In-Wonder card.

Incidentally, if dual VGA is important to you, keep an eye out for the All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro. It’s not available at the time of this writing, but you can read about it on ATI’s web site. In addition to support for dual monitors, it will apparently include an FM tuner and a new version of the Remote Wonder.

Dual monitors aside, however, it’s a rare card that does everything the All-In-Wonder 9800 Pro can do, and I know of no other card that does everything as well as this one does. From class-leading 3D performance to full-featured video capture and output capabilities to a fabulous software bundle, ATI has nailed this one. Simply put, it’s (you knew this was coming) wonderful.