Product: All-in-Wonder RADEON (32 MB AGP version)
From: ATI (www.ati.com)
Price: about $410 CDN ($250 US)
Pros: TV in/out, DVD playback, video capture, closed caption decoder and 2D/3D graphics on a single card. Included software (MerlinVR, Ulead VideoStudio 4, Mediator 5) and a "breakout box" add additional value. Drivers for Windows 2000, Windows 98 and Me are included. (A third-party Linux driver is also available.)
Cons: Some bugs in version 1.00 driver in both 2D and 3D modes. We encountered serious problems when installing this card onto two separate test machines, running Windows 98 and Windows Me.
The package includes
Our tests included:
The Image quality tests were conducted using both the boxed "1.00" drivers, and an updated 4.12.3056 release on ATI's website. Both drivers failed to produce an accurate display of some aspects of the MadOnion 3D Mark 2000 benchmark test we used as part of our test suite, although the more recent release proved an improvement when connected to a TV. Displays of game graphics were occasionally glitchy as well, especially when the optional "full scene anti-aliasing" (FSAA) mode was enabled.
As we saw in ATI's last-generation Rage 128-based products, the AIW RADEON does a better job of displaying game graphics in 32-bit colour modes than it does when the display is set to 16-bit colour. While this is to be expected, we would rate the 16-bit display from the RADEON as inferior to the 16-bit display of competitor 3dfx's Voodoo series of cards, suggesting that there is room for improvement here.
We also encountered a minor issue with icons in some dialog boxes that, when viewed in 32-bit colour modes, displayed shadows in yellow instead of the intended gray colour.
However, a much worse glitch reared its head when we attempted to install the card in a HP Pavilion 9692C computer, running an 800 MHz Pentium III. On this platform, the All-in-Wonder driver would not initialize correctly at all, leaving us stuck in a 16-colour, 640x480 "VGA" mode with no apparent means of escape. We eventually managed to install a driver intended for the (TV tuner-less) RADEON DDR and thus enabled higher resolutions and more colours. However, installing the AIW drivers at this point returned us to the low-res VGA mode. Fortunately, we found that re-installing the RADEON drivers (we used the drivers on the CD labeled 180-GUC088-100) after installing the Multimedia Center for the AIW RADEON gave us a working driver with the TV functionality. Messages on various bulletin board systems around the Net seem to indicate that this problem may affect other computers based on non-Intel AGP chipsets as well. This clearly appears to indicate a software driver problem with the shipping AIW RADEON disc.
We also experienced installation difficulties when installing the AIW RADEON onto a Windows Me system based on an Abit ZM6 motherboard. First, the software wouldn't allow the TV tuner function to work after an apparently successful installation. Then, after we removed it and reinstalled, it gave us "blue screen of death" errors. After a safe-mode restart, it wouldn't allow us to uninstall the driver, presenting instead a DOS screen filled with a huge scrolling list of fairly serious sounding error messages. Then, after trying the RADEON DDR driver trick that had got the Pavilion system working, the ZM6 wouldn't start at all. It crashed with a black screen with vertical lines on it, and a flashing cursor. Fortunately, we were able to uninstall this driver after a Safe mode restart and managed to get the system rebooted to a graphical mode, where we reinstalled the All-in-Wonder Radeon driver, essentially getting us back to square one (i.e., the TV tuner still didn't work.) Argh! Wouldn't most people have given up at (or before) this point?
We solved this issue by loading the WebTV for Windows software (found on the Microsoft Windows CD), rebooting, then going into the Device Manager and manually re-enabling the ATI Video WDM driver. ATI says that, in order to use the ATI Multimedia Center under the original version of Windows 98, you need to install the WebTV software from the Windows 98 CD.
You may also find that manually removing all old video drivers (especially those from older ATI products) before installing this card will persuade the new drivers to work as expected. We finally got it all working perfectly, but what a big hassle! Unless you have a perverse fondness for fiddling with your computer, or enjoy solving nearly inscrutable brain-teasers, we'd recommend having a technician help you install and configure your All-in-Wonder RADEON.
As has been the case in other recent ATI products, The All-in-Wonder RADEON driver disc includes a "Multimedia Center" feature, providing a convenient side-mounted menu of ATI applications, including a DVD Player, TV tuner, File Player, and Audio/Video CD players.
There's also a taskbar icon that allows you to change device or display settings, enable the television display, or launch the various players, if you elect to turn off the side-mounted menu. The software is configured so that, after initial installation, a Help screen pops up to guide you through the process of connecting the card's output to a TV. After it has been reviewed, this information can be permanently dismissed from your screen with a "don't show this again" checkbox.
New Features: Those familiar with older All-in-Wonder products, or competing TV tuner add-ons may be interested in a pair of new features in this product that distinguish it from any others we've seen. Guide Plus is like a computer-based TV Guide for your local viewing area that allows you to easily schedule recordings, watch shows and search for shows of interest. With it, you can record favorite shows directly to your hard drive and then later dump them to video tape or back them up on your choice of removable media, if desired.
Even more interesting to us was the "TV on Demand" feature that permits you to pause or rewind live TV. This feature has, in the past, required the use of an expensive, proprietary box such as the TiVo TV recorder or Replay TV. Now, AIW RADEON owners can take advantage of "time shifting" conveniences, too.
Video capture and playback. With the AIW RADEON, ATI has moved to MPEG-2 as its primary format for recording and saving video. The card's video capture hardware and software can encode images at different quality settings. The system provides "Best," "Good" and "Longest" options, or you can define your own settings. For compatibility with video-editing packages, the software can also save as AVI. (A software glitch, however, prevents the AIW RADEON from working properly with Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder 7.) We were extremely impressed by the image quality of the AIW RADEON's MPEG-2 captures, particularly at the higher quality settings.
As with previous versions of the All in Wonder and ATI-TV products, the AIW128 also has the ability to display video on the desktop or in a window without digitizing it. This means that you can watch TV or videos while you work -- ideal for learning a new software product with the help of a training video. There are options to zoom in 2 times, 4 times or even 8 times closer, and you can resize the display window at will. Although the TV output of the Matrox Marvel series of cards continues to be slightly better, we'd still rate the ATI's TV output quality as excellent and completely trouble-free -- something we cannot say for all the cards based on nVIDIA chips we've tested that claim to support TV output.
Also like previous models, the AIW RADEON provides a closed caption decoder, with a keyword search/capture feature that can automatically save text to disk when a specified word is encountered in the closed captions of a TV news story. Another cool feature is a "TV Magazine" mode that captures closed-captions as word-processor text along with periodic snapshots from the video, formatting them together in an Rich Text format document you can then print out.
Windows Millennium Edition is well supported overall, although the 1.00 driver software did not support S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) output from the ATI DVD Player under Windows Me. The ATI documentation, vaguely cites "technical reasons" for this glitch and says this issue will be addressed in a future update. (Update: A software update addressing this issue has been released.) The AIW RADEON is compatible with WinMe's Hibernate function, and supports dual-monitor operation when added to a system with another compatible (PCI-based) graphics card, such as the 3dfx Voodoo 5x00.
The DVD Player 7.0 supplied with RADEON series of cards has addressed issues with earlier versions of the ATI DVD drivers, in which they sometimes had trouble with certain discs. The Matrix, for example, has a special features section that didn't work properly on early versions of the DVD player included with the AIW 128. However, this disc, and all the others we tried, worked flawlessly on the RADEON. We did, however, experience poor quiality playback with the 4.0 release of the DVD Player for Windows 2000. A subsequent 4.1 update smoothed playback substantially.
The DVD player has additional configuration options that can be accessed via a Multimedia Center control panel. Here, you'll find options to define how the DVD Player interprets audio and video, allowing tweakers to further optimize playback quality. Unfortunately, a piece of paper included with the documentation explains that options described in the manual for changing the settings for brightness, gamma and saturation during DVD playback were removed from the software "due to technical limitations."
A few more tweaking options can be found by clicking the Display control panel's Advanced button. Here, you'll find the option to turn on FSAA, set OpenGL and Direct3D performance and quality options, define refresh rates, colour-matching settings, and several other controls.
3D features. Of course, the card's 3D prowess is an important consideration as well. The RADEON supports hardware Transform and Lighting features, giving it good performance with newer games that contain the special code necessary to enable this feature. In fact, Microsoft's recently released DirectX 8.0 will, with the latest ATI drivers, enable a number of additional features in the RADEON series of cards, as described in this excerpt from an ATI press release:
ATI's upcoming DirectX 8.0 display drivers will unleash the full potential of these revolutionary technologies. Some of the new features being enabled through DirectX 8.0 and found only on RADEON include:
There are, however, a few glitches in the RADEON's 3D support. The card's default OpenGL renderer has some problems when used with a game such as Unreal Tournament that supports S3TC ("S3 Texture Compression") format textures. Fortunately, Radeon enthusiasts are hard at work at workarounds for this issue, too.
A Color Calibration utility is also supplied with the video card, allowing gamma (brightness) control that can help desktop publishers or graphics-oriented users better match on-screen displays with printed results.
Conclusion: Despite a few early driver and installation glitches, the ATI All in Wonder RADEON is shaping up as the best choice in "do it all" video capture and 2D/3D display systems for a PC running Windows 98 or Me. (We do not yet recommend it for Win2K users.) It's a good choice for those looking for a full-featured TV tuning and MPEG-2 capture system, with solid, if unspectacular, 3D performance and high quality TV and composite/S-VHS video output. We recommend having a technician install it.
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