The Radeon HD 4200 also has support for HDMI,
DisplayPort (if integrated) and DVI. HDCP support is native to the Radeon HD
4200's video controller, so it's fully compatible with high-definition content
played over Blu-ray discs. Within
the AMD 785G are two independent display controllers, one digital (DVI/DP/HDMI)
and one analog for displays. Depending on the manufacturers board-level
implementation, the 785G will easily support dual monitors (one analog and one
digital).
The integrated Radeon HD 4200 videocard
on the AMD 785G chipset contains 40 stream processors and shares up to 512MB of
installed system memory. The AMD 785G supports up to six PCI Express 2.0 x1
slots along with six PCI bus mastering slots, although it's up to the
motherboard manufacturer to implement each expansion slot. There are generally
six Serial ATA II ports and a single Ultra/133 IDE controller, coming from the
AMD SB710 Southbridge.
Also integrated are twelve USB 2.0
ports, a Gigabit network MAC and a 7.1 channel High Definition audio controller.
ATI Stream GPU
Acceleration
ATI Stream, like NVIDIA CUDA, is a way of accelerating
desktop applications like Adobe Creative Suite 4, MediaShow Espresso and Microsoft
Silverlight using a graphics processor instead of relying on just the CPU. There
are certain intensive tasks that are easy to optimize for the massively parallel
nature of an IGP like the Radeon HD 4200 that can cause even the fastest CPUs to
stall. ATI has been working with developers like Adobe and Microsoft so that
everyday programs can take advantage of a dedicated GPU in a desktop
environment.
Adobe in particular has embraced GPU acceleration, and
the latest version of its Creative Suite brings support for both NVIDIA
Geforce and AMD Radeon GPUs. Hardware acceleration support in programs like
Adobe Acrobat Reader and Photoshop can improve rendering performance and
smoothness when navigating large PDF documents and images.
ATI Stream has added video transcoding
technology that enables the Radeon HD 4200 IGP to accelerate video
encoding. With the advent of video-capable portable media players like the
iPhone, Sony PSP and Microsoft Zune, video encoding is an increasingly popular
task even amongst mainstream and home users.
It also remains a very intensive
task, as encoding or transcoding a movie ripped from DVD to play on the
iPod can take hours depending on the video quality and length.
Acceleration support is still quite limited at this point, with
only certain codecs (H.264, MPEG2, VC1) and programs (Cyberlink Espresso, ATI Video
Converter, Arcosoft Total Media Theatre) supported.
Let's go in for a closer look at the ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO
motherboard next.