TV Teletubbies

The Seven Wonders

ATI's distinguished history of TV tuner and video capture products also began the same year the Mach64 launched. ATI released the Video-IT! and Video BASIC in 1994. Both were simple ISA video capture cards developed for Windows 3.1x that allowed users to capture video from Laserdiscs, camcorders and video tape. The Video-IT featured an Intel 82750PD chip for hardware Indeo video compression while the Video BASIC used software based RLE compression exclusively. These products were the ancestors to today's All-in-Wonder.

ATI introduced its second-generation 3D chip, the 3D Rage II and the ImpacTV, a 800x600 VGA to TV encoder in 1996. At a time where external VGA-to-TV boxes ran for $200 to $300, ATI was offering a 3D Xpression+PC2TV for $300, a 4MB 3D graphics accelerator with high quality TV output.

That same year, ATI also brought out its first TV tuner products, the All-in-Wonder and ATI-TV. Featuring 3D acceleration powered by ATI's second generation 3D Rage II, the first of seven Wonders also added 64-bit 2D performance, TV-quality video acceleration, video capture, advanced TV tuner capabilities, flicker-free TV-out, and stereo TV audio. People who already had ATI graphics cards could upgrade their systems with the ATI-TV, an ISA card which had many of the same features as the AIW.

The All-in-Wonder Pro, released in late 1997, upgraded the board with "TV Magazine," a feature which allowed users to record transcripts and images for later use, and an "Instant Replay" function that buffered 10 seconds of video. The board also had a second generation ImpacTV2 that allowed for even higher quality TV output.

January 1999 brought the All-in-Wonder 128, the first AIW board to feature the Rage 128 GL graphics chip. This product generation added Digital VCR functionality with software MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 capture. The 16MB edition launched on time and was widely praised. The 32MB version did not fare as well.

Rage Theater

The All-in-Wonder 128 32MB was supposed to be more than a memory upgrade for the original 16MB card. It was also ATI's first product to use the Rage Theater companion chip. Previous AIW cards from ATI used a separate Brooktree (Conexant) chip for video input and an ImpactTV2 chip for TV-output. The Rage Theater did the job of both chips with higher quality, and even had the ability to send S/PDIF digital audio out during DVD playback. Moreover, the Rage Theater offered improved flicker-filters for the TV-output and used a new 10-bit video DAC which offered up to 4 times more color accuracy than the previous 8-bit chip. The quality improvement from the higher performance DAC is similar in principle to using 32-bit true-color pipelines in a multitextured application with 16-bit textures.

Unfortunately, ATI faced significant delays and by the time the 32MB edition hit store shelves in November 1999, the S/PDIF support had been dropped and the Matrox Marvel G400 and 3dfx Voodoo3 3500TV were well ahead in 3D performance. The Rage Theater TV-out chip and top-notch multimedia performance was not enough for critics to overlook the card's lagging 3D performance

The All-in-Wonder Radeon

The 32MB DDR All-in-Wonder Radeon arrived in the summer of 2000 and brought with it TV-on-Demand. Thanks to the rapid development of CPUs, the AIW Radeon allowed users to pause live TV or step back minutes into a broadcast. Nothing is missed as the rest of the show is recorded on your HD while you pause or replay parts of the show. This TiVo like feature, called timeshifting, was unique to the All-in-Wonder Radeon. Ironically, later Radeon drivers would later break this feature and as we will see, video card drivers have been one of ATI's lingering weaknesses.