Any used an ATI 5450 and 5570 yet?

[RyanW]

I'm looking to do a small upgrade to my HTPC. I'm looking for a video card that can send audio over HDMI, and sufficiently handle Sage. My current 8600GT has problems when I enable DX and 3D acceleration in Sage. So I've had to leave all the fancy stuff turned off.

Anyone tried an ATI 5450 or 5570 yet? This machine is not used for gaming, so the extra HP of the 5570 isn't really needed. However, if I need to bump up to the 5570 to turn on all of the glitz in Sage, I will.

Also, any word on the HW codec acceleration? Does it work out of the box, or do you need to get a 3rd party codec (such as from Cyberlink)?

-Ryan

[SWKerr]

I would be interested in any comments about the gaming on a HDTV at 1080p or 720p. I need a new card anyway and was looking to move a ATI 4550 and buying something with more power for the main HTPC for a little light Gaming. The Xbox 360 is great but my son has started to expand to some PC games. Not willing to spend more than $100 so limited options.

I was looking at the ATI 5570 and the GeForce GT 240.
Comment and recommendations welcome.

[RyanW]

I grabbed a PowerColor AX5570 1GBD3-LH from newegg for $65 (after rebate). It's working, it's quiet, but drivers and Sage setup were a pain.

After installation, I immediately downloaded the updated drivers and then proceeded to try to configure things. The first thing you'll notice is ATI has the screen scaled with an underscan setting of 8%. Who's driving a CRT these days? It should have been full screen by default. It was difficult to find the control to change it, but google was my friend.

Next, HDMI audio. Window's audio worked, so did Vista Media Center. However, no love from Sage. I saw many posts suggesting the audio drivers from ATI's website weren't as good as the ones from the RealTek website, so I grabbed those instead. Still no audio in Sage (I tried all the output options). Finally, I did a clean reinstall of Sage, and now audio works in Sage, I've arrived.

Lastly, video settings. At the moment, I have all of the hardware acceleration features turned on in Sage, but I did experience stuttering this morning that required a Sage restart. So I'm guessing I'm going to need to disable one or more of them.

Final verdict. Seems like a good HTPC video card. It will probably be a lot smoother install in another 6 months, after ATI can iron out more of the driver issues. Be prepared to do a clean reinstall of Sage when changing hardware, it doesn't handle it gracefully.

-Ryan

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Lastly, video settings. At the moment, I have all of the hardware acceleration features turned on in Sage, but I did experience stuttering this morning that required a Sage restart. So I'm guessing I'm going to need to disable one or more of them.

See my post on ATI graphics and SageTV.

While I haven't tried the 5xxx series yet, I would suspect the same issues are there. This is a known bug in SageTV, and a fix is expected in v7.

[jgscott987]

Here's a great table showing which video cards are capable of DXVA, which uses the video card to accelerate video processing.

http://www.missingremote.com/index.p...1&limitstart=1

[RyanW]

Thanks for the link bbone. When I get to trying to tune my video options I'll keep that info in mind.

Right now, I'm still experimenting with the HDMI audio. I was actually able to go back to the ATI provided drivers (rather than the ones directly from RealTek) and get that to work. Not sure what's happening there.

I'm now trying to verify if I have 5.1 audio going out to my amp. My amp supports Dolby Digital, but not DTS. The driver seems to have options for choosing what format your amp supports. But everytime I test it, it complains that the device (meaning the ATI card I presume) doesn't support any of those features). I suppose that's possible in terms of audio rendering, but hopefully it does pass-through just fine.

That said, and although I do hear multiple channels on my speakers (Pro-Logic I presume), my amp never display "Dolby Digital" like it does when my DVD player is connected to it.

I'm going to keep digging. But, if anyone has debugged this already, I'm all ears.

-Ryan

[autoboy]

Turn on the smooth playback feature in the CCC drivers. It works well.