[willc]

Hi there,
I'm planning to upgrade the graphic card for my HTPC and also upgrade my TV to a 4k/UltraHD TV. I was wondering if anyone knows of any quiet graphic card capable of providing 4k output (via HDMI 1.4). My HTPC currently have an iCore 7 CPU, SSD and 3TB hard disk but a rather old graphic card.

I'm aware the RED is proposing to launch the RED Redray 4K player soon but would prefer a PC solution.

Many thanks

Will

[audio.addicted]

You need something with DisplayPort 1.2 ... current HDMI 1.4a does not support 4K (AFAIK). See this http://www.amd.com/de/Documents/50279_AM...1-2_WP.pdf

[DJ_Izumi]

You need something with DisplayPort 1.2 ... current HDMI 1.4a does not support 4K (AFAIK). See this http://www.amd.com/de/Documents/50279_AM...1-2_WP.pdf

HDMI 1.4 does indeed support 4K, but only up to 30hz and various graphics cards support 1.4a. I wouldn't know which ones off hand, but it should be technologically possible without major hastle.

...Not sure XBMC's skins will look nice at 4k or if any of the decoders can do it. I know support for hardware decoding can vary wildly, but on my A6-3500 the DXVA decoding just explodes. It basically crashes. Using the CPU you hit another issue: XBMC's video decoding is still single threaded. You won't decode a 4K video stream on one core of ANY CPU. They just arn't fast enough. Using software decoding of the 4K encode of Sintel, I'm getting 8-10fps just because only one core can be utalized for the video decoding thread and one ain't enough.

Edit: Tested it again using my 4K h.264 encode of 'Sintel'. (I last tried this in the summer) It seems XBMC doesn't crash on DXVA playback of 4K, instead it seems to detect that it's 4K and otherwise incompatible with my DXVA and uses the software decoder even if DXVA is enabled. Either way, 8-10fps.

[willc]

Thanks guys for the quick response.

From the press releases it looks like the AMD 7970 could output 4k videos.

Notwistanding that it looks like its not so straight forward - the TV that I was potentially looking to buy (LG 84LM960V, Sony's KD-84X9005) might not be able to handle 4k @60hz. I suspect that the Sharp PN-K321 LCD could do so but is a bit too small for me.

DJ_Izumi - thanks for your help. Do you know of any decoder that handles 4k well?