ATI to include HD audio on HDMI Radeon cards

Creative must surely be getting its knickers in all sorts of sweaty, tangled knots of late. It seems everyone now wants a slice of its almost exclusively-held discreet sound card pie.

Recently we heard ASUS is whipping out an aurally tasty sound card it dubs 'Xonar.'

Well, now big red of yore, ATI -- who is now an unquestionable shade of green -- is due to unleash upon the masses its next generation series of video card, the Radeon R600. And it includes an onboard sound card.

In fact, ATI's new graphics line up will each contain their own high definition audio decoder. This is no pass through job, according to Charlie Demerjian of Inquirer fame, as a separate chip on the graphics card will process the audio itself.

Presumably 'graphics card' is pushing semantics a wee too far. The marketing droids will no doubt force feed a sordid term like 'HD board' down our buzzword-sick throats.

The audio will be sent directly over the HDMI link, although not before first passing through a cryptic HDCP content mutilator. This, of course, makes it a Vista love-child, in all its DRM-filled glory.

We haven't yet a clue as to whether it will feature Dolby or DTS technologies, however if Creative is half as protective as it usually is, chances are it won't contain the EAX audio presets.

In other news related to ATI's upcoming graphics line, it apparently now has a name. In place of the covert R600 title, if what Fudzilla reports is correct, the new graphics card series will respond to the name 'Radeon X2900.'

Undoubtedly NVIDIA is doing the nervous shuffle dance alongside Creative. Ingenuity does tend to have that effect.

If the market accepts this media conglomerate of a card, we would expect NVIDIA to add its own sound chip to its graphics line. Utterly wild speculation, but could this mark the return of the awesome SoundStorm audio chip? One can only hope.