ATI Radeon HD 4600 & 4800 series support 7.1 channel HDMI audio! - Page 7

ECS and Palit and Zotac all have MCP7A boards on display at computex - two variants it appears, the GeForce 9200 and GeForce 9300 (same as the 8200 and 8300 in the X300 version has faster graphics). Unlike the 7XXX series Intel IGP chips, this one appears to be dual channel memory, which should help them be more successful than the last gen...

No word on HDMI 1.3 support as of yet.

The thread is about the 48XX video cards audio abilities. Since AMD is not putting Creative chips on the card it will not be able to offer true EAX 3D sound localization. The tangential discussion is about what this card may not be able to do in the way of playing game-related audio in the HTPC.

I didn't read every post of this thread but does anyone know if any of the cards will have onboard HDMI out or will it be DVI-->HDMI out?

Looks like all the ones displayed so far have DVI out and then do HDMI through a DVI->HDMI adapter.

The Asus Xonar has HDMI-out

The DTS connect and DDLive are mainly functional for gamers who want the ability to pass their environmental and 3d positional audio via a single, digital cable to their receivers; and those media files that are not originally encoded in full surround sound. Most games are not encoded in Dolby or DTS formats (though I think this may change in the near future) and this is the best way so far to avoid cable clutter while still getting quality, multichannel audio.

There are other surround effects and management/level options that those Asus and other Oxygen HD cards are capable of applying before passing the info to the receiver as well that the Radeon cards may not be capable of. We'll have to see how these devices integrate into the Windows audio management software and/or what AMD/ATI ships as far as drivers and audio software for these video cards.

Well, my point was that given that you have 7.1 HDMI available, why would you do DDL or DTS Connect over HDMI? The only way they make sense over HDMI is if you don't have 7.1 PCM available over HDMI, either if your card is limited, like the current HD2000 or HD3000 cards, or if your receiver can take DTS or DD over HDMI but cannot take multichannel PCM, and I don't know any receiver that doesn't.

Believe me, I do appreciate DDL or DTS Connect, one of my favorite pieces of hardware I've ever bought is the Sondigo Callisto.

I understand your point. I was just pointing out the very reasons above. Other than games (that don't use the sound codecs we've been talking about and non-multichannel encoded media, there is no reason. The key word here is encoding. If the source is not encoded, then your bitstream or LPCM "may" be completely useless. And, again, I've pointed out those types of audio that may not be encoded in multichannel codecs that can be interpreted digitally by an AVR above.

We have yet to see how these multichannel PCM solutions will work with games that utilize environmental audio effects.

Edit: I'll grant you that it may be a moot point. For this issue, we'll have to wait and see. There aren't any products so far touting info about how gaming and other, non-media specific audio will be treated through the new multi-channel HDMI interfaces. I'm eager to find out though.

As far as I know, most HDMI solutions which do 7.1 LPCM just treat non-encoded sound as PCM. This includes Windows, gaming environmental sounds, etc. Is there reason to believe this is not true of some games?

It's the digital equivalent of plugging 7.1 analog channels into the back of your sound card, in other words. Are there cases where this is violated?

I know information is piecemeal at this point, but is this card supposed to do everything that the Asus HDAV1.3 will do regarding 1) bitstreaming hi def audio formats and 2) giving the option of passing uncompressed 7.1 audio through HDMI? I realize that the added benefit of the Asus card is that it comes bundled with Arcsoft TMT which will properly decode the hi def formats in order to let them be passed uncompressed to the receiver. But, barring any software issues, is this card supposed to do everything the Asus HDAV1.3 does?

Alex

No there are not.

Some people lack understanding and say things in mixed up ways. As fairly indepth techy and avid gamer since I installed a soundblaster in to my dad's 386, all games end up in the windows sound mixer so output is whatever soundmixer can do with it. 2-8 channel analog, 2 channel spdif, 2-8 channel HDMI, DD Live, DTS connect are all options for games. But there is no "direct stream EAX" or anything similiar.

Games are no different than any other multichannel audio source on the PC.

We don't know.

Hopefully we'll know more at least by the beginning of July. Fingers crossed.

That isn't entirely true. Unless you had Multi-channel encoding (DD-Live or DTS connect) before, you would not get all surround effects through bitstream over SPDIF because audio was not encoded to Dolby 5.1 or DTS natively--nor did it go out as LPCM. Only PCM 2-channel was presented to the receiver. That's one of the reasons that Nvidia SoundStorm with Dolby Digital Live was such a big thing back in the day... It finally gave people the opportunity to stream their audio to an AVR or speaker system that could decode Dolby Digital via a single digital connection.

We are still waiting to see how these things are handled through the HDMI interface from these devices. This is why I think that gamers will still benefit from DDLive and DTS Connect. Unless the games are coded in those formats or setup to send their audio as LPCM, you will not necessarily get multichannel audio (except for 2-channel stereo) over the HDMI interface--unless there is some other, 3rd party solution to resolve this issue.
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Edit:

In otherwords, Archibel is completely correct in his assessment. Windows has no other way to treat sound other than specifically as 2-channel PCM without some sort of go-between software or codec interpreter or decoder software or hardware intervening (at least when connected to a digital interface). I'd love someone to let us know if they are actually getting full surround sound from their games right now through the HDMI interface only to their audio receiver--especially those who have the newer chipsets that are supposed to allow 8 channel LPCM through the HDMI connection. Unless they have some driver or software that tells Windows to send that sound in LPCM format, then it will probably just come out as stereo PCM. Please prove me wrong! Because that would resolve a big unanswered question in my mind and I'm sure others are wondering as well.

That's not exactly where I was going with that, actually. Right now, motherboard audio sound which adheres to the HD Audio spec in sending out the data on analog 7.1 channels typically uses a renderer that gives information to the sound codec in PCM. 8-channel PCM, to be specific. Microsoft's UAA (Unified Audio Architecture) pings the end-device for capabilities, not necessarily for specifics on what the interface actually is.

I can't speak for the ATI and Nvidia solutions, but the way this works on Intel solutions is the UAA queries the HDMI port, and the HDMI port returns with "I am capable of 8-channel PCM", and all UAA-processed sounds come out as 8-channel PCM and get sent to the receiver that way. In the absence of a discrete sound card, all sounds (games, alerts, etc.) go through UAA, so at least in Intel's case all sounds can be sent out over HDMI and DD Live and DTS Connect are redundant or even inferior.

I obviously can't speak to the ATI or Nvidia solutions-- frankly, I don't know if they use UAA or bypass it with audio architectures of their own-- but I can't imagine they do anything too differently.


Ask your question in the G35 or Nvidia 8200 threads. I'm sure you'll get interesting answers.

That has ZERO to do with games. Games themselves didn't have to have 1 line of code for DD Live or DTS connect. Those were driver level fixes to compress the 8 channel LPCM generated by the game into an encoded format that could be shipped over spdif.

All games generate LPCM and drop it off into the windows sound mixer, that's all they do. After that, what happens to the sound is entirely up the the drivers and hardware. Soundstorm (I owned it), DD Live, DTS connect are all examples of hardware and driver level solutions for getting multichannel audio out of the PC.

Also encoding the audio to DTS or DD is something that people are doing even now with blu-ray. If you have a machine with SPDIF many discs now come with only an LPCM soundtrack so your options are either the 2 channel alt sound track or have cyberlink encode the LPCM on the fly into either DTS or DD depending on what your reciever supports.


Um, the G35 and 8200 can do 8 channel LPCM for games right now (not that you'd want a G35 for games). But lots of people have the 8200 setup with 8 channel LPCM to their recievers right now. Windows reports 5.1 or 7.1 as your speaker setup. So you just go into the game and tell it to have 5.1 sound and your done. No 3rd party needed.

I think where you are confused is that many of the HDMI solutions out there do not support 8 channel LPCM (I'm talking to you ATI) they are essentially SPDIF + DVI in an HDMI form factor.

Dude, I've owned 5 different soundstorm motherboards (Asus, Abit, Biostar and 2 Shuttles). That is exactly what I was getting at. In order to pass more than 2 channels via SPIDF a 3rd party hardware/software solution was necessary that's where the SoundStorm came in. And, guess what? Without those drivers or software, all that passed over SPIDF was 2 channel audio. All I was asking was if these HDMI devices do the same thing. From what has been said they do unless the hardware, drivers and software allow them to pass all of the information. I NEVER said that games had DDLive. That is not at all what I said. I said that the gaming sounds REQUIRED DDLive or DTS connect to pass their multichannel audio over the digital connection. Analog connections worked fine--and this would make complete sense as YOU say because they're dumping LPCM into the Windows Mixer. If the hardware and/or software you're trying to use doesn't support it, they they will NOT pass the multichannel info through a digital connection.

I do hope you're not taking this personally. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of what these devices are capable of--and making sure that they aren't just glorified SPDIF connections once again. That's why I asked my question at the end. If the answer is that the G45 and the 8000 series solutions are working properly, that's all you need to say.

This is what I was looking for. Hopefully, the ATI and Asus solutions will be able to answer the OS query in a similar fashion and be able to produce all audio in an uncompressed format. It will be interesting to find out why they are leaving DDLive capability resident in the ASUS solution if this is the case. It may just be for those who plan to continue using the SPDIF interface until they have a compatible receiver to utilize the full HDMI capabilities...

Sorry for the mixup slackerX,

If you looke my first resposne was to Archibebl, who's not as fimiliar with games, and was asking if there are some other hooks or encoding scheme that games would use. And in general the answer is no, there is not.

If you look in my response (that you quoted by the way) I enumerated all the possible output formats for games. There I listed SPDIF as 2 channel for LPCM or DDLive, DTS connect as the only digital spdif options (so we've really been on the same page the whole time).


I was trying to be clear, unfortunetly HDMI with it's multiple feature level ******** has made things so mixed up that it's hard to explain to people, because HDMI doesn't really mandate any level of audio support.

So we have
HDMI w/ spdif
HDMI w/ 8 channel LPCM but no bitstreaming
HDMI V1.3 w/ 8 channel LPCM but no bitstreaming (see PS3)
HDMI V1.3 w/ LPCM and bitstreaming.

Which HDMI are you talking about?
Anyway HDMI w/ 8 channel LPCM is great for games and there are a few motherboards out there that support it now and the ATI4800 is rumored to support it and the new Asus xonar will also support it.

I do hope all of the solutions that are coming out now support the final 1.3 capabilities you pointed out there: HDMI V1.3 w/LPCM and bitstreaming... I hear the 4850s have already shipped, but I haven't found any reviews yet.

NDAs will expire on the 18th. Expect lots of reviews and comparisons to appear that morning.

When they say they launch June 23th or 25th, when will we able to see the card in the local retailer shelf or on-line retailers?

unless this video card can bitsstream I'm waiting for the asus audio card.

Supposedly this is a hard launch, so you should be able to buy the cards on-line on those dates. B&M stores will probably get them a couple of weeks later.

cool - thanks.

Some of these questions may be obvious..

But.. Do you need to have a crossfire (say intel x48) chipset motherboard to do crossfire (sli).. I'm hoping to get two of these 4850's when they come out.. and maybe do crossfire.. I'm guessing they dont make a board which does both nvidia sli and crossfire?

With nvidia you can use a software script to turn off sli.. can the same be done on a crossfire board? Does using crossfire mean that only one of the 4 video ports will work.. Or if you use two 4850's independently, i wonder what this will imply as far as the truehd or hdmi audio going out across the hdmi.. would they both have hdmi audio..

Those are the new adjusted launch dates and you will certainly be able to buy a 4850 and maybe a 4870 on those dates.

However, the equipment was sent to reviewers when the launch date was still the 18th. So the Non-disclosure Agreements have all been dated on June 18th, 2008. I am sure the tests have been completed and the articles written. Legally the reviewing websites can release their findings and data on the 18th, so expect the real info then.