R600's secret weapon revealed

[redlight]

Just read this on the Inquirer site. I hope its true. It eases the pain of waiting

R600's secret weapon revealed

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38714

[zashark]

Sounds good

[shaithis]

Absolutely useless IMO.

People buy "top of the range" gfx cards for gaming which will never require HDCP over HDMI. On top of that, until these gfx card manufacturers get back to designing cards that can run passively, not many people are going to put one of these cards in their "nice and quiet" HTPC.

Enquierer as usual tho...."killer app" lol....Damn it'll be half the price to buy an XBox360 and stream to it instead of upgrading your PCs GPU.

[tigerboyce]

mh, pointless, just add even more high price

[redlight]

Absolutely useless IMO.

I use my rig for everything. Work,gaming,music,recording tv and watching movies. I would not be able to justify the cost to my missus otherwise.

[GoNz0]

Absolutely useless IMO.

People buy "top of the range" gfx cards for gaming which will never require HDCP over HDMI. On top of that, until these gfx card manufacturers get back to designing cards that can run passively, not many people are going to put one of these cards in their "nice and quiet" HTPC.

Enquierer as usual tho...."killer app" lol....Damn it'll be half the price to buy an XBox360 and stream to it instead of upgrading your PCs GPU.

if people like you designed PC parts there wouldnt be any ghey blue lights stuck everywere

yeh valid point, but with the HD era coming in this looks to be very usefull, a friends about to upgrade video as he just took delivery of a 30" screen, this will deffo sway him to the R600

[dangel]

Seems like a good idea and I can't see it adding much to the price. I wouldn't use it personally but I can see how it makes sense for home cinema.

[Thorburn]

Enquierer as usual tho...."killer app" lol....Damn it'll be half the price to buy an XBox360 and stream to it instead of upgrading your PCs GPU.

Except even a XBox 360 Elite will not be HDMI 1.3 compliant (only 1.2) and therefore won't support the lossless audio CODECs.

Its a useful feature to have, although for R600 its relevance is less than the lower end cards, heres hoping for ATIs sake that its integrated across the range.

[shaithis]

Well, you have to think what your feeding that HDMI signal into....

Most people will be feeding it into an amp, so you could use multichannel PCM.....AFAIK there are currently no amps that support HDMI 1.3 anyway and even when there are, other then the increased colour depths that it would support, there is no need for 1.3 due to the MC PCM (split at source) being no different to DTS-HD (for example). Both will sound identical.

[Skinleech]

Well, I'm looking up upgrade the graphics card in my HTPC to a DX10 part - why upgrade my A64 3400/256mb 6800GT when I can just upgrade the X2 4400 HPTC and play Crysis on my 50" HDTV?

Yes, noise is an issue as it's an HTPC, but it's not as if the current DX10 Nvidia cards are silent. ATI will eventually get less powerful variants with passive cooling out, or 3rd party solutions...

Going on, the ability to ouput audio over HDMI is a good thing for me (once I have a suitable amp) so ATI is looking more attractive to me from the offing.

[DavidM]

Out of interest - I wonder if theres any way to use the audio if you don't use HDMI?

[dangel]

Good question!

Perhaps a splitter cable comes with it?

[kalniel]

Out of interest - I wonder if theres any way to use the audio if you don't use HDMI?

Yeah, this would actually be the 'killer app' for me - having a sound card built into the graphics card. Then we're going down the route of having just one add in card that's properly multi-functional (sound, GPGPU, graphics).

[aidanjt]

Audio over HDMI expects you to feed audio into crummy TV speakers, this 'feature' has no advantage for the enduser what so ever, it just proves how viral DRM really is. Graphics cards are designed for one thing, rendering graphics, audio follows a completely different set of principles, thus why Creative cards sells so well.

[Clunk]

Gimicky and pointless, but no doubt that this will be a selling point for a lot of people.

[Skinleech]

Audio over HDMI expects you to feed audio into crummy TV speakers.

No it doesn't.

Maybe over here, where we are so behind every other continent, there is no option bar into a tv set, but HDMI audio is designed for Dolby True HD, and LPCM 5.1

Any receiver that will accept a totally uncompressed 5.1 track is worth the audio over HDMI feature - if you're into your movies that is. LPCM 5.1 tracks clock in at approx 4gb for a 2 hours movie - the size of a single layer DVD give or take..