High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering is one of the most popular new image quality and realism-enhancing features of the latest games. It makes use of specialized data formats to more accurately capture the full range of brightness and color that the eye can perceive.

Working with HDR requires high performance, full precision floating point rendering capability. Since HDR data formats can contain more information than standard quality data formats, they demand generous amounts of memory and bandwidth. The new generation of GPUs should be ready to handle these demands. It is also very important that they be capable of HDR rendering together with other established image quality techniques, such as anti-aliasing.

One nice thing about HDR, now that they have the issues worked out of it you can now enable HDR and run 6xAA at the same time give you absolutely stunning results and causing the folks at Nvidia to growl a little bit.

AVIVO (Advanced Video in and Out)

ATI has come upon an idea that when you stop and think about it makes a lot of sense. The idea I am referring to is AVIVO, Advanced Video In and Out.  ATI has decided that to make the most of video experience we need some way to control it from the minute it enters our PC until it leaves it our enters into the end-to-end process also known as the video pipeline.

Some of the key capabilities delivered by Avivo are:

•The Media PC experience: tuner-enabled PCs entering the living room and becoming the premier consumer electronics device for TV and PVR (personal video recorder) functionality

•The Digital TV revolution: Digital, over-the-air broadcasting is taking hold worldwide. The ability to receive and playback these signals will be central to future media PCs

• HD-Disc playback: Next-generation blue-laser optical discs such as Blu-ray and HDDVD are on the horizon. Avivo enables their use on the PC with advanced decoding capabilities

• Digital Photography and Digital Imaging: with digital imaging becoming an integral part of people’s professional and personal lives, it becomes important to deliver a flexible, flawless experience to even the most demanding user

To highlight just one of the features of AVIVO we can take a look at a two different screen captures, one of them was done using and older low quality 9 or 10 bit Analog to Digital Converter and the other picture is done with the Avivo 12-bit Analog-to-Digital conversion.