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Sapphire's X1600 Pro HDMI
Sapphire confirms HDMI enabled card for April of 2006

Sapphire today announced that it has confirmed supplies of its much anticipated HDMI compliant graphics card. Its Radeon X1600 Pro card is fully equipped with the necessary components to support full HDMI-HDCP output. Sapphire had been speaking about the card for several weeks but questions on availability were still up in the air. Today Sapphire confirms that products will be available in April.

The architecture also supports Avivo(TM) delivering vibrant high fidelity images and video playback to the latest High Definition (HD) video standards. The new HDMI version is a low profile PCI Express card which supports HDCP and delivers exciting new levels of display performance and quality over this new industry standard connection interface.

Quick specifications:

Engine clock: 500MHz
Shader units: 12
Memory clock: 800MHz DDR3
Memory interface: 128-bit
Memory amount: 128MB
Interface: PCIe
Outputs: HDMI-HDCP (1920x1080P), VGA, SPDIF

Note that the card is also able to pass audio signal through the HDMI interface or through a SPDIF connection.

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audio chip?
By brownba on 3/6/2006 2:26:48 PM , Rating: 2
so does this video card have an audio chip onboard?
or does it have to take the signal from an additional source and just pass it along through the HDMI cable?




RE: audio chip?
By fliguy84 on 3/6/2006 2:29:15 PM , Rating: 2
I think it's the latter since I can see some header pins on the card (right beside the TV-out)


RE: audio chip?
By regpfj on 3/6/2006 2:36:28 PM , Rating: 2
I think the tv-out you're referring to is the digital audio the artilce refrences. Composite video output is usually yellow, digital audio is usually orange. Regardless, I think it's pass-through audio - why would they put a sound processor on the video card?


RE: audio chip?
By rupaniii on 3/6/2006 3:44:14 PM , Rating: 2
Hey now, wait a tick...
nVidia SoundStorm was always very awesome.
I'd pay for an HDMI card with SoundStorm and the next gen GPU. Yeah, I could go for that. I'm fairly sure that won't flood a single X16 pipe.


RE: audio chip?
By brownba on 3/6/2006 5:02:26 PM , Rating: 2
I agree, there could be a market for video cards with a built-in high-end audio solution.


RE: audio chip?
By PrinceGaz on 3/6/2006 5:34:56 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there isn't. Anyone who is interested in high-quality audio will buy a discrete soundcard. Soundstorm was an anomaly caused by the old X-Box, there's a good reason why you haven't seen it further developed in later nVidia chipsets.

Suggesting there is a market for video cards with a built in high-end audio solution makes about as much sense as saying there is a market for professional sound cards with a built in high end video solution. They are almost totally seperate markets and the only integration that is even worth considering as feasible is a graphics-card with an ALC650 for those people whose mobos didn't include any sort of sound. Except they all do now so even that has no place.

The correct way to go with HDMI audio implementation is having input jacks on the graphics-card that it passes through, not some lame onboard audio solution, and certainly not the quality-reducing Soundstorm some people can't get over.


RE: audio chip?
By sotti on 3/6/2006 6:29:14 PM , Rating: 2
Depends on your perspective. I've very in to audio. Although I'm in the digitial is digitial camp.

So a video card that could do say DTS or Dolby Digital encoding on the fly or simply pass through the systems PCM audio or the pre-encoded contents of a movie would be sweet.

Even if it couldn't do encoding, it's one less braket/card for my HTPC


RE: audio chip?
By UNCjigga on 3/7/2006 2:56:51 AM , Rating: 2
Don't kid yourself. The reason why we don't see a lot of discrete audio on the motherboard is because they're all trying to keep costs down, especially for the OEM market. Video cards are a whole other market. If you've got a $600 video card to sell, why not have audio? It seems like the next logical step for ATI's All-in-Wonder series. I bet by the end of the year (or early next year) ATI will have an All-in-Wonder with digital cable support (OCUR), HDMI-HDCP output, 720p/1080i-to-1080p upconversion/deinterlacing and support for HD audio and built-in Dolby Digital/DTS encoding.

There's a definite need for the small form-factor market too. The whole Viiv/Live! push means we'll be seeing smaller HTPCs, and these usually only have room for one PCIe x16 card. If discrete audio can fit on a video card, you're no longer stuck with motherboard audio.


Why bother?
By Egglick on 3/6/2006 6:29:53 PM , Rating: 2
The orange jack looks like an SPDIF *input* (so you can run a jumper cable from your soundcard's output).


Why do they need to bother with audio anyway?? It's not a standalone solution, so it's just more crap to mess with when you can just connect directly to the soundcard. Does the HDMI spec require an audio stream to be going through it or something??




RE: Why bother?
By JarredWalton on 3/6/2006 7:23:02 PM , Rating: 2
I have an HDTV with an HDMI port, and while I can send video via a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, I can't get audio through the TV in this fashion. So, I'm pretty sure the full HDMI stream is supposed to have audio as well as video.


RE: Why bother?
By Egglick on 3/6/2006 8:13:16 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah, but I'm sure that your HDTV has other methods of video input than just HDMI. Since none of those other methods can stream audio, your TV must also have other methods of audio input (meaning you could just directly connect it to your sound card).

My question is whether the HDMI spec *requires that audio also be streamed through it. If it doesn't, then videocard manufacturers could save some money by not including the audio hardware on low-end cards.


RE: Why bother?
By kalaap on 3/6/2006 10:46:02 PM , Rating: 2
HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) is the first and only industry-supported, uncompressed, all-digital audio/video interface. Straight from hdmi.org


RE: Why bother?
By Zoomer on 3/8/2006 4:34:55 AM , Rating: 2
Too bad about HDCP.


why
By Missing Ghost on 3/6/2006 5:38:59 PM , Rating: 2
I don't really understand how this is better than dvi. Who needs this?




RE: why
By masteraleph on 3/6/2006 7:31:15 PM , Rating: 2
BluRay and HDDVD are only going to output above 480p over digital connections with HDCP. This card (with the HDCP on the HDMI) will allow you to do that (of course, all of that would require bluray/hddvd drives and probably windows vista, none of which are out yet).


Nice card
By electriple9 on 3/6/2006 5:32:51 PM , Rating: 2
Perfect htpc card. I just wish it was passively cooled.
Thanks




Bit disappointing
By prohandyman on 3/6/2006 6:00:32 PM , Rating: 2
Agreeing that it is time for these type of cards to show up... why on a lesser card? At least an X1600 with 256mbs of RAM, to best work with Vista? You would think the implementation would start at the higher end, not the lower mid-range.

Audio is pass threw... headers are quite visible. You shouldn't see audio on a graphics card, only because of Hi-frequency interference.




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