Ati 4850 HD Audio

[Shelster]

Not sure if this should have gone in GFX or here, but as it's an audio question, will pop it in here.

Have noticed that above card has audio output, but tbh am not entirely sure how to get this working.

I have bought it for my HTPC and will be connecting it into a Onkyo 605 receiver.

Is it just going to be as simple as changing audio O/P of PC in control panel to HDMI, throwing a DVI - HDMI changer on back of card then connecting it to my receiver and hey presto, shiny GFX and true 7.1 audio from PC or is ther some other maginc that i will have to weave on the beast?

Cheers

Paul

 

[beavis]

You'll need the correct ATI DVI->HDMI adaptor, unfortunately you can't just chuck a normal on there. Most of the ATI cards come with them now, it can be a real pain to get hold of them afterwards.

I used the 'ATI HDMI Audio Device' driver from the Realtek site and got it passing DD/DTS to my 605 after much messing around. WinDVD has a hdmi audio option, I suspect spdif will do the trick in PowerDVD.

There's not enough bandwidth for TrueHD and DTS-HD so don't expect them to work.

It's nice when it works

 

[Amnesia]

well i did try this and no i didnt mess about with any settings to get it to work...all i did was used the ati adaptor that came with the card on the back of the graphics card and stick the hdmi cable in the back of the adaptor.
turned on the tv and thats it...it was outputting sound as well as video.

i didnt test it for very long though because my hdmi cable is a bit short and i had to pull my pc out from the desk to test it.

cant comment on quality but getting it to work is pretty simple.

*EDIT*
just to add...i already have a soundcard in my pc and it didnt affect that in any way and neither did i have to change any settings to get it to work

 

[Shelster]

Cheers for th eresponses guys.

Looks promising.

Card came with a DVI - HDMI adapter which i am using atm , but just for video as am waiting for a hdmi switch to turn up as have ran out of IPs on my amp.

Fingers crossed

Paul

 

[Beansprout]

I've been researching this tonight since I realised graphics cards can output HDMI which would save me buying a PS3, and found the following from Anandtech (can I link to that site??)

Blu-ray (and HD-DVD) both support Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD audio encoding, which offer discrete 8-channel audio output. The problem is that there's currently no way to send a TrueHD or DTS-HD encoded stream from a PC over HDMI to a receiver, the stream must be decoded on the PC. Cyberlink's PowerDVD will decode these high definition audio formats just as well as any receiver into 8-channel LPCM audio, but you need support for sending 8-channel LPCM over HDMI.

Most graphics cards that implement HDMI simply pass SPDIF from the motherboard's audio codec over HDMI, which is unfortunately only enough for 2-channel LPCM or 6-channel encoded Dolby Digital/DTS audio. Chipsets with integrated graphics such as NVIDIA's GeForce 8200 and Intel's G35 will output 8-channel LPCM over HDMI, but AMD's 780G will not.

All of AMD's Radeon HD graphics cards have shipped with their own audio codec, but the Radeon HD 4800 series of cards finally adds support for 8-channel LPCM output over HDMI. This is a huge deal for HTPC enthusiasts because now you can output 8-channel audio over HDMI in a motherboard agnostic solution. We still don't have support for bitstreaming TrueHD/DTS-HD MA and most likely won't anytime this year from a GPU alone, but there are some other solutions in the works for 2008.

This seems to indicate that it'll send everything but TrueHD and DST-HD as a bitstream over HDMI, with those two being decoded in software then sent over as LPCM.

I suppose that doesn't really make any difference really - your (and my!) 605 probably do about an equal job to a PC? (no idea about this)

It sounds like the 4850 is the answer, but this is horrendously complicated....another site was going on about PAP, HDCP, secure audio paths and all sorts of rubbish :s