AMD AVIVO HD Content Playback	Source: AMD

Playing high definition content on current generation PCs can bog down even the fastest processors because there is more data to handle. To test AVIVO's HD accelerating capabilities, we played the High Definition Blu-Ray movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen through CyberLink PowerDVD 7.2 Ultra. CPU utilization was monitored during playback through Task Manager to give a general indication of system load.

High Definition Content Playback Utilization Results
720p Resolution:
CPU usage when running the Blu-Ray movie is much higher than running the simple WMV9 Microsoft movies. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen chewed up between 47-55% of the CPU resources, a bit on the high side but there's still plenty left for background tasks.

Despite an interesting name, AVIVO does not stand for anything specific. It is a collection of different video technologies that share a common name, like Centrino or ViiV for example. First and foremost, AMD's AVIVO includes a hardware accelerator for MPEG-2/DVD Microsoft Windows Media HD video standards (WMV HD) and H.264 standards.

VIVO is built into the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT videocard and helps to enable such features as Home Theatre PCs (HTPC) or Personal Video Recorders (PVR) with the appropriate 3rd-party software applications. AVIVO can automatically adjust gamma and colour correction, and that should enhance picture quality too.

High Fidelity Colour allows for 10-bits per colour channel, which translated basically means a more vibrant picture. There is also a high quality 12-bit analog-to-digital converter to reduce picture noise as well.

Overclocking is up next. Yay!