AMD unleashes the ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 3400 and ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 3600 series

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Joined: 9 Oct 2006

I'm wondering the same thing with my Nvidia 7600GS AGP...

HTPC addict

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Joined: 30 Sep 2006

Lothar wrote:

I'm wondering the same thing with my Nvidia 7600GS AGP...

With regards to AGP, no you didn't make a mistake. ATI's few AGP offerings from the Radeon HD 2x00 and 3x00 series are quite bad thanks to driver issues and completely non-functioning UVD support.

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Joined: 30 Sep 2006

The Radeon HD 3650 really does look a great card for a little bit of everything.

Also of interest is that ATI is saying the 3470 scores well on the HD HQV tests and can handle scaling 1080p up to the higher resolution of some 30" monitors.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIwMTA2NjU5N1BaV1FZMlJDR...

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Joined: 3 Oct 2006

Let's see a review with a single core p4 or AMD socket A and AGP version. Oh and the fanless version in a small HTPC case. If it works with HD then I'll be impressed. IT would be nice to dig up some old hardware and make it functional.

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Joined: 30 Sep 2006

PAPutzback wrote:

Let's see a review with a single core p4 or AMD socket A and AGP version. Oh and the fanless version in a small HTPC case. If it works with HD then I'll be impressed. IT would be nice to dig up some old hardware and make it functional.

You realize going down to a Socket A CPU is unrealistic. If we get a sample I will test it on my Athlon 64 3700+ which is pretty old these days, and single core.

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Joined: 30 Sep 2006

Not like it matters since an AGP version is just going to be moot due to the bad drivers and borked UVD (which Matt already mentioned so I don't know why it was even brought back up).

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Joined: 8 Jan 2007

Matt wrote:

The Radeon HD 3650 really does look a great card for a little bit of everything.

Also of interest is that ATI is saying the 3470 scores well on the HD HQV tests and can handle scaling 1080p up to the higher resolution of some 30" monitors.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIwMTA2NjU5N1BaV1FZMlJDR...
yep 1440p, i remember reading about some companies working on tv's that have that resolution as wel, remember those linedoubler tv's we had for a while, same idea, take a 720signal, and boom, requires a bit of work with the pixels but that is not such a big problem.

in fact why not go for 2160 lines (3x720 and 2x 1080)

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Joined: 3 Oct 2006

I don't understand the bad drivers and borked UVD comment. Where does that come from. My 3870 works fine, even with 64 bit drivers.

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Joined: 15 Mar 2007

People forget that the "Universal Video Decoder" is not really that "universal."  Only VC-1 and H.264 are fully accelerated, leaving mpeg2 without very good acceleration.  From my experience with a single core S754 Athlon64 3400+ at 2.2ghz, ATSC 1080i mpeg2 comes close to 75% of the cpu while using a 2600pro.  It seems that the mpeg2 is accelerated in the shaders of the card and not in the UVD, creating high load on the shaders and CPU since they are also responsible for doing the deinterlacing.  This problem is so bad, that they disabled all mpeg2 acceleration on the 2400pro.  Whether this continues on the 34X0 series is not certain, but I CAN tell you that any BluRay movie in 1080p mpeg2 like Black Hawk Down will not run on anything less than a dual core CPU even with the "acceleration" provided by the video card.  Since mpeg2 is not widely used for BluRay or HD-DVD you may be fine most of the time, but pairing one of these cards with anything less than a 2ghz Athlon64 is not a good idea if you watch any ATSC broadcasts.  Since that is the majority of my viewing, I was really dissapointed with the 2400pro, and I even had major issues getting the 2600pro stutter free with 1080i ATSC mpeg2 while the more difficult h.264 movies played flawlessly.

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Joined: 3 Oct 2006

From HardOCP

We saw a 1.4GHz CN processors running a Blu-ray HD video easily as well as a 1.2GHz passsively cooled CN running 720P video content and plowing through a desktop application benchmark. (Updated 012408:0800_

Without a doubt, what was most impressive was seeing a 1.8GHz CN processor running Crysis. While I am not going to go out of on a limb and say it was the best Crysis experience you might have, there is no doubt that this low power “UMPC” processor was more than up to the task that I would never ever guessed possible on a VIA/Centaur CPU. Certainly, CN is not aimed at powering the most demanding 3D shooter game in the world, and after seeing it run Crysis successfully it is certainly that the CN/Isaiah processor is more than up to the tasks that might be thrown its way in the UMPC segment.

So this tells me that if the chip is designed right it can process the video. My guess is the 3400 should be able to run it, if the software (most likely powerdvd) knows how to use it.

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Joined: 9 Oct 2006

PAPutzback wrote:

Let's see a review with a single core p4 or AMD socket A and AGP version. Oh and the fanless version in a small HTPC case. If it works with HD then I'll be impressed. IT would be nice to dig up some old hardware and make it functional.

Get someone to throw one my way and I'll see that you get your tests.  I've got a P4 single core w/ AGP that I run as my main development/backup server system.

HTPC addict

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Joined: 30 Sep 2006

PAPutzback wrote:

I don't understand the bad drivers and borked UVD comment. Where does that come from. My 3870 works fine, even with 64 bit drivers.

The discussion was about an AGP version of the card. ATI's has royally fucked AGP users by not having a feature complete driver set for AGP users, when the HD 2x00 series was released it was quickly found that the AGP cards don't have UVD enabled properly and still don't to this day.

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Joined: 8 Jan 2007

PAPutzback wrote:

I don't understand the bad drivers and borked UVD comment. Where does that come from. My 3870 works fine, even with 64 bit drivers.
apart from the agp UVD is not available to all

h264/vc1 only via powerdvd for hd disks (99% of h264 files are downloads)
mpeg2 same
only wmv works out of the box

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Joined: 3 Oct 2006

Thanks for the info. I didn't know they crippled the cards. I had no problem watching HD via my HD Home run so I figured any other format getting a boost from a newer graphics card could only get better.

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Joined: 3 Oct 2006

Well I put a post in the sapphire forums and oen of their senior members responded with this.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/amd_radeon_hd_3850

All decoding work is offloaded from the CPU to the card.. AGP should be the same.

This really doesn't mean squat to me until I see a review of some legacy hardware stating framerates from the popular hd video formats.

http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/forums/showthread.php?p=111402#post111402

I dropped some names hoping someone at Sapphire would take notice and send a sample out to someone with our best interests in mind. If HD on legacy hardware interests anyone else I would ask that you drop a note here also.

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Joined: 6 Dec 2006

This is perfect timing for me... I'm in the market to put a nice HTPC video card in my new Quad core PC to hook up to my 40" Sony Bravia KDL-W3000.  The only question is... should I go for the 3650 or up to the 3850?  Is it worth the extra ~$70 or so?

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Joined: 30 Sep 2006

It looks like there is a little bit of feedback on AGP HD 3850's and they do seem to accelerate the HD codecs properly unlike the HD 2x00 series AGP cards. So there's  hope that the AGP 34xx and 36xx would also have UVD working properly.

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Joined: 30 Sep 2006

Sweet. Even sweeter if I had any AGP based systems anymore.

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Joined: 30 Sep 2006

http://en.hardspell.com/doc/showcont.asp?news_id=2361&pageid=2327
The 3650 looks like a real winner, which isn't surprising. The real question is what does the 3450 or 3470 perform like? ATI has been touting them as the best fit for an HTPC.

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Joined: 8 Jan 2007

different set of needs, useless in games but they do have the 1080p part right where in needs to be.

the crucial question then becomes what do these cards offer (apart that you can use them with intel chips) that the rs780 does not.

Who among us does not have this urge to plug one of those in a tf-5

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