HD DVD, Blu-ray playback added to new entry-level ATI cards

For years, ATI played itself as the performance leader in the graphics space. But now as part of AMD, which is having a difficult time of late making its case for CPU performance, ATI may have to make like its new corporate parent for a little while.

It was not a premium feature of high-end graphics cards for very long: This morning at a rollout event in Beijing, AMD is announcing its ATI division has added DirectX 10.1 support to two new Radeon cards at the low end of the price spectrum, with the new HD 3400 model expected to retail for as low as $49.

The HD 3400 and HD 3600 are essentially desktop-oriented models of the Mobility-branded counterparts for notebook systems, launched earlier. Both utilize essentially the same architecture, though the 3600 packs more transistors into the package: 378 million versus 181 million.

Their key features of note are the on-board support for all the codecs necessary to decode Blu-ray or HD DVD video at full 1080p resolution. That feature alone makes either of these cards ideal for inclusion in low-cost media center PCs.

But the DirectX 10.1 support doesn't hurt, either. Both new cards will feature slightly stepped down versions of the same DX 10.1 support that ATI premiered last November. Among the features from that graphics library that ATI is incorporating is global illumination, which goes a long way toward substituting for full ray-tracing ability. The feature samples the ambient light at select points in a 3D scene, with the result being that objects in moderately lit spaces appear more natural, as though they're being viewed by the naked eye rather than grafted into virtual space.

At most, the HD 3600 card probably won't sell for over $100 retail, AMD stated this morning. This pricing move signals a continuation of AMD's shift in emphasis toward the value side of the computer market, as AMD's CPU division struggles in the performance department against rival Intel. There may not be a similar gap between ATI and NVidia, however, and ATI's new across-the-board emphasis could help it gain market share among mainstream buyers.