Production > HDMI Info

HDMI is a pretty hot thing to have on a product box these days, it's almost a trendy word... time for us to review a product that actually supports it. And thus welcome to the first graphics card review with actual HDMI connectivity. HDMI as you know is a new connector often to be found at HD screens. The big advantage is that such connector is digital... analog is a thing of the past. Secondly and equally important is the fact that a HDMI card is (or should be) HDCP compatible.

We'll explain topics like HDMI and HDCP, HD Ready in-depth and obviously will show you the entire installation and connectivity path guided by a photo shoot. All that on the next page but first let's talk a little about the card responsible for it.

The card we'll be using today it pretty low-budget. But hey it suits our needs really well... the card comes from Galaxy. This product used to be in the 160 EUR price range, yet with new cards inbound and time passing .. Galaxy recently decided to introduce a GeForce 7600 GS with 256MB gDDR3 memory (128-bit) and HDMI; all that for merely 110 EUR.

HDMI or not, the card itself comes pre-overclocked... so that's a mighty fine deal for an average PC or even better... Home Theater PC as that G73 graphics core most definitely can utilize PureVideo to decode your SD/HD videostreams extremely well.

So that all sounds pretty interesting... now if you are like me and have built HTPC's then you just know that it's always a gamble if the actual output will be what you expect it to be.
I mean... over DVI-D we have connected cards to a Plasma screen only to get a black screen returned. Or what about massive over- or underscan issues. Don't we all know these issues? So I was a little sceptical when I had that HDMI compatible card in my hands... none the less we'll do two primary things today. Obviously we'll have a look at performance, and secondly... we'll setup a PC with this card and connect it to a 43" Samsung HD screen (HD Ready) and observe if we can get it running and setup properly.

Let's talk about the graphics card itself first a little before we dive into the HDMI controversy.

The silicon powering this graphics card comes from NVIDIA and was developed under codename G73, the actual 7600 GS chip was made with a 90nm fabrication process. For a mid-range product it has a rather large transistor count, actually no less than 177 million transistors can be found on both the GeForce 7600 GS and GT silicon.

You might ask... what's different on this Galaxy card compared to the regular GeForce 7600 GS and GT then? It's a valid question and allow me to answer it.
Get this, 12 pixel pipelines running at a 575 MHz frequency; for your information a default GS is clocked at at 400 MHz. It is packed with five active vertex processors which bind to eight ROPs. The memory however is still 128-bit whereas I hoped it would have been boosted to 256-bit.

The good thing about the memory on this card is that it's clocked fast though...

1.2ns gDDR3 memory at 1500 MHz (2x747) which is higher than the 7600 GT and way higher than the standard reference GS. That is looking to be quite okay in my eyes.

Judging from the specifications this 110 EUR product should be able to compete with the middle segment of current mid-range graphics cards such as the 7600GT very well.
Since it's a Series 7 product you can expect a dual-link connector (through HDMI) for extremely high resolution gaming up-to 2560x1600 (XHD as the industry would love to call that = Extreme High Definition) and all the sweetness in the form of HDR support and that finally important Shader Model 3.

HDTV - HDMI - HDCP - HD-Ready terminology explained
Okay, let's have a brief chat about what exactly verbs like HDMI and HDCP mean. The HDTV market continues to heat up, and who has not heard about terms like HD Ready?

Let's run through some terms. HDTV stands for High Definition Television, the current image standard is know as Standard Definition. The high definition format uses upto 1080 lines to make up the picture you see on your TV compared to 576 for the current standard, HD will also be broadcast in widescreen 16:9 format rather than the conventional 4:3 format. This will make for a truly cinematic experience.

Very blunt: HD = More lines = more pixels = better picture quality

In simple terms the image you will see with HD will have vastly improved image detail and color reproduction.

HDMI means High-Definition Multimedia Interface. It is a new kind of digital audio and video connector that will replace all connectors currently used by DVD players, TV sets and video monitors. The big idea here is that we should all use a single cable instead of several cables when connecting your DVD player to your TV set, for example. Interesting fact... HDMI is similar to DVI with three exceptions... HDMI is a much smaller connector (it pretty much looks like an USB connector), HDMI utilizes copy protection called HDCP (high definition copy protection) and finally; HDMI carries multi channel digital audio. HDMI, like DVI, is ALL-digital therefore picture quality is "perfect" from source to display.

It is possible to connect a device that uses DVI to another that uses HDMI, thru a cable with a HDMI connector at one end and a DVI connector at the other. it is what we have been doing for a while now and was mentioned in several of our articles.

HDMI also implements a copy-protection mechanism called HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection). First off... from now on, all series 7 cards with HDMI from Galaxy are HDCP compatible as they'll include a crypto chip as default. Why the need for it ? Well... with Vista when you want to playback HDCP content (movies) on your monitor... the resolution could be dumbed down or even worse if your monitor, content and graphics card do not have a HDCP (content protection) handshake. It's like this: your screen will go black during playback, if you do not have a HDCP encoder chip working on the graphics card. So close to the cooler you'll notice a small EEPROM slash CryptoROM doing that magic for you. Galaxy included it on these boards. Mind you that if you like to playback media files with a HDCP ready graphics card... you'll also need a HDCP compatible monitor (hey don't look so angry... don't shoot the messenger!).

So .. a HD Ready television will have either a DVI (Digital Video Interface) or HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface). Both connections provide exceptional quality, HDMI is often referred to as the digital SCART cable as it also provides audio. DVI supplies picture only, separate cables are needed for audio. Both HDMI and DVI support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) which will be a requirement for protected content.

Standard and High definition Decoding with PureVideo HD
For this 110 EUR HDMI HDCP ready graphics card there's a neat little trick you can pull with NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards starting at series 7. NVIDIA made the GPU (the graphics chip) an important factor in en/decoding video streams. With a special software suite called PureVideo you can offload the video encoding/decoding process from the CPU towards the GPU, and the best thing yet it can greatly enhance image quality.

PureVideo HD is is a video engine built into the GPU (this is dedicated core logic) and thus is dedicated GPU-based video processing hardware, software drivers and software-based players that accelerate decoding and enhance image quality of high definition video in the following formats: H.264, VC-1, WMV/WMV-HD, and MPEG-2 HD.

So what are the key advantages of PureVideo? In my opinion two key factors are a big advantage. To offload the CPU by allowing the GPU to take over a huge sum of the workload. HDTV decoding through a TS (Transport Stream) file, for example, can be very demanding for a CPU. These media files can peak to 20 Mbit/sec easily as HDTV streams offer high-resolution playback in 1280x720p or even 1920x1080p without framedrops and image quality loss.

By offloading that big task for the bigger part of the graphics core, you give the CPU way more headroom to do other which makes your PC actually run normal. The combination of these factors offer you stutter-free high quality and high resolution media playback. All standard HDTV resolutions of course are supported, among them the obvious 480p, 720p and 1080i modes and now also 1080P (P=Progressive and I=Interlaced). Ever since the Series 75 ForceWare driver, PureVideo is doing something I've been waiting on for quite some time now, 2-2 pull down which converts 24 frames per second to 50 frame per second PAL. But along with this the new G80 series (and this'll work on G70 as well) will offer HD noise reduction, which is great feature with older converted films. And this is where we land at Image Quality. PureVideo can offer a large amount of options that'll increase the IQ of playback. This can be managed with a wide variety of options. Obviously NVIDIA has some interesting filters available in the PureVideo suite like advanced de-interlacing, which can greatly improve image quality while playing back that DVD, MPEG2 or TS file (just some examples). Aside from that, things like color corrections should not be forgotten. All major media streams are supported by NVIDIA with PureVideo. And yes High Definition H.264 acceleration, which will become a big, new and preferred standard, is also supported.

Paradox: You do not need PureVideo for HDTV playback and connectivity, but it is recommended if you have that dedicated hardware in your system anyway.

Once you offload media streams to the graphics processor things look much better with the help of PureVideo. Have a look at the graph below where you are monitoring the CPU at work at roughly 12-20% decoding a HDTV .TS file

Indeed, a huge improvement over standard decoding. We are now at a CPU utilization of 12-20%, really nice for a HD MPEG2 stream. The processor is almost doing nothing. This for example is a Transport Stream file with a HDTV resolution of 1920x1080i.

In combo with the new drivers you can now also decode High Definition H.264 streams. H.264 is a compression algorithm used to transmit video efficiently between endpoints. This algorithm is seen as the replacement for its predecessor, H.263. What is different about H.264 is that it promises to deliver high quality video, H.264 also enables very high quality encoding, producing way better results than even MPEG2 and of course HDTV levels. These GeForce series 7 and 8 cards can also manage 3:2 and 2:2 pull down (inverse telecine) of SD and HD interlaced content.

New with the introduction of GeForce 8800 we see a 10-Bit display processing pipeline and also new post-processing options (works for GeForce series 7 as well):

• Adds VC-1 & H.264 HD Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing
• Adds VC-1 & H.264 HD Inverse Telecine
• Adds HD Noise Reduction
• Adds HD Edge enhancement