AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs
by Ryan Smith on September 23, 2009 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Race is Over: 8-channel LPCM, TrueHD & DTS-HD MA Bitstreaming
It's now been over a year since I first explained the horrible state of Blu-ray audio on the PC. I'm not talking about music discs, but rather the audio component of any Blu-ray movie. It boils down to this: without an expensive sound card it's impossible to send compressed Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio streams from your HTPC to an AV receiver or pre-processor. Thankfully AMD, Intel and later NVIDIA gave us a stopgap solution that allowed HTPCs, when equipped with the right IGP/GPU, to decode those high-definition audio streams and send them uncompressed over HDMI. The feature is commonly known as 8-channel LPCM support and without it all high end HTPC users would be forced into spending another $150 - $250 on a sound card like the Auzentech HomeTheater HD I just recently reviewed.
For a while I'd heard that ATI was dropping 8-channel LPCM support from RV870 because of cost issues. Thankfully, those rumors turned out to be completely untrue. Not only does the Radeon HD 5870 support 8-channel LPCM output over HDMI like its predecessor, but it can now also bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. It is the first and only video card to be able to do this, but I expect others to follow over the next year.
The Radeon HD 5870 is first and foremost a card for gamers, so unless you're building a dual-purpose HTPC, this isn't the one you're going to want to use. If you can wait, the smaller derivatives of the RV870 core will also have bitstreaming support for TrueHD/DTS-HD MA. If you can't and have a deep enough HTPC case, the 5870 will work.
In addition to full bitstreaming support, the 5870 also features ATI's UVD2 (Universal Video Decoder). The engine allows for complete hardware offload of all H.264, MPEG-2 and VC1 decoding. There haven't been many changes to the UVD2 engine; you can still run all of the color adjusting post-processing effects and accelerate a maximum of two 1080p streams at the same time.
ATI claims that the GPU now supports Blu-ray playback/acceleration in Aero mode, but I found that in my testing the UI still defaulted to basic mode.
To take advantage of the 5870's bitstreaming support I had to use a pre-release version of Cyberlink's PowerDVD 9. The public version of the software should be out in another week or so. To enable TrueHD/DTS-HD MA bitstreaming you have to select the "Non-decoded high-definition audio to external device" option in the audio settings panel:
With that selected the player won't attempt to decode any audio but rather pass the encoded stream over HDMI to your receiver. In this case I had an Integra DTC-9.8 on the other end of the cable and my first test was Bolt, a DTS-HD MA title. Much to my amazement, it worked on the first try:
No HDPC errors, no strange player issues, nothing - it just worked.
Next up was Dolby TrueHD. I tried American History X first but the best I could get out of it was Dolby Digital. I swapped in Transformers and found the same. This ended up being an issue with the early PowerDVD 9 build, similar to issues with the version of the player needed for the Auzentech HomeTheater HD. Switching audio output modes a couple of times seemed to fix the problem, I now had both DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD bitstreaming from the Radeon HD 5870 to my receiver.
One strange artifact during my testing was the 5870 apparently delivered 1080i output to my JVC RS2 projector. I'm not exactly sure what went wrong here as 1080p wasn't an issue on any other display I used. I ran out of time before I could figure out the cause of the problem but I expect it's an early compatibility issue.
I can't begin to express how relieving it is to finally have GPUs that implement a protected audio path capable of handling these overly encrypted audio streams. Within a year everything from high end GPUs to chipsets with integrated graphics will have this functionality.
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ClownPuncher - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Absolutely, I can answer that for you.Those 2 "ports" you see are for aesthetic purposes only, the card has a shroud internally so those 2 ports neither intake nor exhaust any air, hot or otherwise.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
ClownPuncher gets a cookie. This is exactly correct; the actual fan shroud is sealed so that air only goes out the front of the card to go outside of the case. The holes do serve a cooling purpose though; allow airflow to help cool the bits of the card that aren't hooked up to the main cooler; various caps and what have you.SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Ok good, now we know.So the problem now moves to the tiny 1/2 exhaust port on the back, did you stick your hand there and see how much that is blowing ? Does it whistle through there ? lol
Same amount of air(or a bit less) in half the exit space... that's going to strain the fan and or/reduce flow, no matter what anyone claims to the contrary.
It sure looks like ATI is doing a big favor to aftermarket cooler vendors.
GhandiInstinct - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Ryan,Developers arent pushing graphics anymore. Its not economnical, PC game supports is slowing down, everything is console now which is DX9. what purpose does this ATI serve with DX11 and all this other technology that won't even make use of games 2 years from now?
Waste of money..
ClownPuncher - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Clearly he should stop reviewing computer technology like this because people like you are content with gaming on their Wii and iPhone.This message has been brought to you by Sarcasm.
Griswold - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
So you're echoing what nvidia recently said, when they claimed dx11/gaming on the PC isnt all that (anymore)? I guess nvidia can close shop (at least the gaming relevant part of it) now and focus on GPGPU. Why wait for GT300 as a gamer?Oh right, its gonna be blasting past the 5xxx and suddenly dx11 will be the holy grail again... I see how it is.
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
rofl- It's great to see red roosters not crowing and hopping around flapping their wings and screaming nvidia is going down.Don't take any of this personal except the compliments, you're doing a fine job.
It's nice to see you doing my usual job, albiet from the other side, so allow me to compliment your fine perceptions. Sweltering smart.
But, now, let's not forget how ambient occlusion got poo-pooed here and shading in the game was said to be "an irritant" when Nvidia cards rendered it with just driver changes for the hardware. lol
Then of course we heard endless crowing about "tesselation" for ati.
Now it's what, SSAA (rebirthed), and Eyefinity, and we'll hear how great it is for some time to come. Let's not forget the endless screeching about how terrible and useless PhysX is by Nvidia, but boy when "open standards" finally gets "Havok and Ati" cranking away, wow the sky is the limit for in game destruction and water movement and shooting and bouncing, and on and on....
Of course it was "Nvidia's fault" that "open havok" didn't happen.
I'm wondering if 30" top resolution will now be "all there is!" for the next month or two until Nvidia comes out with their next generation - because that was quite a trick switching from top rez 30" DOWN to 1920x when Nvidia put out their 2560x GTX275 driver and it whomped Ati's card at 30" 2560x, but switched places at 1920x, which was then of course "the winning rez" since Ati was stuck there.
I could go on but you're probably fuming already and will just make an insult back so let the spam posting IZ2000 or whatever it's name will be this time handle it.
BTW there's a load of bias in the article and I'll be glad to point it out in another post, but the reason the red rooster rooting is not going beyond any sane notion of "truthful" or even truthiness, is because this 5870 Ati card is already percieved as " EPIC FAIL" !
I cannot imagine this is all Ati has, and if it is they are in deep trouble I believe.
I suspect some further releases with more power soon.
Finally - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Team Green - full foam ahead!*hands over towel*
There you go. Keep on foaming, I'm all amused :)
araczynski - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
is DirectX11 going to be as worthless as 10? in terms of being used in any meaningful way in a meaningful amount of games?my 2 4850's are still keeping me very happy in my 'ancient' E8500.
curious to see how this compares to whatever nvidia rolls out, probably more of the same, better in some, worse in others, bottom line will be the price.... maybe in a year or two i'll build a new system.
of course by that time these'll be worthless too.
SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Well it's certainly going to be less useful than PhysX, which is here said to be worthless, but of course DX11 won't get that kind of dissing, at least not for the next two months or so, before NVidia joins in.Since there's only 1 game "kinda ready" with DX11, I suppose all the hype and heady talk will have to wait until... until... uhh.. the 5870's are actually available and not just listed on the egg and tiger.
Here's something else in the article I found so very heartwarming:
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" Wrapping things up, one of the last GPGPU projects AMD presented at their press event was a GPU implementation of Bullet Physics, an open source physics simulation library. Although they’ll never admit it, AMD is probably getting tired of being beaten over the head by NVIDIA and PhysX; Bullet Physics is AMD’s proof that they can do physics too. "
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Unfortunately for this place,one of my friends pointed me to this little expose' that show ATI uses NVIDIA CARDS to develope "Bullet Physics" - ROFLMAO
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" We have seen a presentation where Nvidia claims that Mr. Erwin Coumans, the creator of Bullet Physics Engine, said that he developed Bullet physics on Geforce cards. The bad thing for ATI is that they are betting on this open standard physics tech as the one that they want to accelerate on their GPUs.
"ATI’s Bullet GPU acceleration via Open CL will work with any compliant drivers, we use NVIDIA Geforce cards for our development and even use code from their OpenCL SDK, they are a great technology partner. “ said Erwin.
This means that Bullet physics is being developed on Nvidia Geforce cards even though ATI is supposed to get driver and hardware acceleration for Bullet Physics."
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rofl - hahahahahha now that takes the cake!
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15642/34/">http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15642/34/
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Boy do we "hate PhysX" as ati fans, but then again... why not use the nvidia PhysX card to whip up some B Physics, folks I couldn't make this stuff up.