Legit Video Card Reviews
ATI Radeon HD 5870 DX11 Video Card Review
| Manufacturer: | AMD |
| Product: | Radeon HD 5870 |
| Date: | Tue, Sep 22, 2009 - 11:00 PM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
| Share: |
Bitstream Audio Testing
As we mentioned earlier the ATI Radeon HD 5850/5870 graphics cards support bitstreaming Dolby TrueHD / DTS-HD Master Audio with Blu-Ray DRM support via the card's HDMI connector. ATI has been working closely with Cyberlink and their latest version of PowerDVD 9 actually supports these new audio features! Cyberlink was kind enough to let Legit Reviews take a very early version of their v9.0.2010.0 software for a test drive to take a peek at bitstreaming audio. Since this version of PowerDVD is beta, they asked us not to review/evaluate the PowerDVD player, but rather just try out the audio streaming that we wanted to look into.
Late last week ATI released driver version 5.0.7000.8, which is the driver that we used for our audio testing on the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. Just to give you a little background here in case you need it, DVDs use either Dolby Digital or DTS encoding for their audio tracks. Blu-Ray supports Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Digital TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio and uncompressed LPCM. Both Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio are known to be great as they are touted as being lossless when decoded properly as it is possible to get a bit for bit identical copy of the audio the studio originally mastered for the movie. Since the ATI Radeon HD 5850/5870 graphics cards support bitstreaming Dolby TrueHD / DTS-HD Master Audio with Blu-Ray DRM support via the card's HDMI connector it means that the audio quality when it comes to Blu-Rays should be better than nearly anything else on the market today.
Using the newly released Blu-Ray X-Men Origins: Wolverine we briefly tired out the DTS-HD playback on several A/V receivers that support DTS-HD like the Sherwood RD-7503 ($351.49) and Onkyo TX-NR807 ($994.00) with no issues at all.
If you look closely you'll notice that the audio is DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, but the output is Linear Pulse Code Modulation (LPCM). This is because every graphics card on a PC today lacks support for a Protected Audio Path. This means is that there's absolutely no way to output an uncompressed Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio signal over HDMI from any PC video card. As you can see above we are only using the two audio channels on our 1080P 120Hz HDTV, but the Radeon HD 5000 series supports up to 8-channel LPCM output over HDMI.
If you go to the audio control panel in Windows 7 you'll notice that unlike the Realtek codec that showed up in the Radeon HD 4800 series an ATI driver shows up on the Radeon HD 5800 series.
Next Page - Final Thoughts and Conclusions
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - The World's First DX11 GPU
Page 2 - The Radeon HD 5870 Page 3 - Radeon HD 5870 With No HSF Page 4 - The Test System Page 5 - Batman: Arkham Asylum Page 6 - Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Page 7 - Need For Speed: Shift‎ Page 8 - Resident Evil 5 Page 9 - Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. Page 10 - 3DMark Vantage Page 11 - FurMark 1.7.0 Page 12 - Temperature Testing Page 13 - Power Consumption Page 14 - Overclocking Page 15 - Extreme Overclocking Page 16 - Bitstream Audio Testing Page 17 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions |
Socialize