A popular source of debate at the SE discussion board, DVD acceleration is becoming as much of a mainstay on video chipsets as high 2D performance levels are.

As with the ATi Rage Fury 32MB card we tested previously (which also uses the Rage 128GL graphics processor) the All-In-Wonder 128's DVD playback was fast, stable, and utilized the lowest amount of CPU overhead that we've seen from an integrated solution.

Of particular hilarity to the Sharky Extreme staff was the All-In-Wonder 128's ability to display the playing DVD image with audio on Win98's desktop background, complete with all icons and folder symbols overlaid on TOP of the image (complete with full icon usability)

Who needs Microsoft's now defunct ChromEffects eh? This ability sure gives new meaning to the term "screen saver"….

We also liked and admired the quality of the All-In-Wonder 128's DVD image presentation to a standard TV via the card's S-Video out jack. Using this setup Sharky Extreme testers were able to produce the All-In-Wonder 128's DVD playback image using a standard S-Video cable and compare it to an identical DVD movie being played by a standard Sony home video component player on an additional TV.

Telling the difference between the two DVD solutions while they were running was difficult, but not impossible. Compared to the separate Sony DVD player equipped TV, the All-In-Wonder 128 had some slight dithering and color variance, both of which were imperceptible to viewers sitting more than three feet away from the 32" TV's screen.

The All-In-Wonder 128 has the best DVD image reproduction that we've seen yet from a non MPEG-2 decoder card equipped solution, this technology has progressed amazingly in the last 10 months. (That's the amount of time it's been since we saw our first non MPEG-2 video chipset decoder equipped vid card).

Again, the drivers make it easy here, all options were concise, to the point, and effective.