HDMI cable to do some GPU work?

[Lewis - A2A]

An Australian consumer advocacy group called Choice did some tests on HDMI cables when Blu-Ray was coming out and the format was becoming a standard.

In Australian retailers (I know this for a fact as I worked for one at the time) You could buy a 1.5m HDMI cable for anything from $20 to $499+

After testing various brands and lengths they concluded that the image quality to the general consumer (the cables target markets) was indiscernible and the sales people trying to up-sell you a $200 HDMI cable with your $250 Blu-Ray player was pretty much a scam as the $20 one works just as well over that distance.

Expensive cables started to pull ahead at long/industrial usage lengths, 20m+

I tried digging up the article but can't find it at the moment, fascinating read at the same as I was in that industry selling TV/Entertainment stuff to family consumers, never did flog any $450 HDMI cables, much to the displeasure of my bosses and the cable company CEO's!

Please watch the video, this isn't just a cable its got a chip inside it to help sort the image quality out, as bourne out in the real world factual, here are the results, cant claim otherwise, this isnt an opinion, but fact based testing sort of thing.

If talking about standard cables then yes, LTT and so many others have done several videos on the snake oil gold dipped cables etc, the idea of this video was that it started out as one of those snake oil videos but during the testing they discovered that holy moly this thing actually works as you too can see when you see all the results. Even on a 720p youtube video you can see the clear results across games and video. There are some con's against the pro's but its still pretty damn and I would have thought in the fs community where getting AA right and stopping or sorting shimmering on landscape etc is important there would be some real interest in cheaper cables slowing coming down the pipeline, free us up to use the gpu elsewhere in nvid inspecter etc.

[AKar]

So, essentially this is a hardware image up-scaling chip on the cable?

Yeah, that would kind of work, if one has a video output below the nominal resolution of the display set. The up-scaling is done either in the TV/display, or in this chip, so it comes down to whether the chip does it better than your display does. Many do it horribly, so there is potential for a gain. However, this would not introduce any additional data to the signal, aside any processing artifacts and such. Only way to achieve that would be to pass on a higher-resolution video to begin with, and that can only be done in the GPU. If feeding the monitor at its nominal resolution, no gains would be achievable.

-Esa

[bobsk8]

So, essentially this is a hardware image up-scaling chip on the cable?

Yeah, that would kind of work, if one has a video output below the nominal resolution of the display set. The up-scaling is done either in the TV/display, or in this chip, so it comes down to whether the chip does it better than your display does. Many do it horribly, so there is potential for a gain. However, this would not introduce any additional data to the signal, aside any processing artifacts and such. Only way to achieve that would be to pass on a higher-resolution video to begin with, and that can only be done in the GPU. If feeding the monitor at its nominal resolution, no gains would be achievable.

-Esa

As I previously stated, I have worked in this industry all my life, and still work as a consultant even though I am retired from full time work. The idea that a chip included in a $150 cable could scale as well as a scalar in a GPU made by a major manufacturer is totally absurd. Any time additional scaling is used, there is always the possibility of artifacts in the video, so a good GPU coupled with a decent cable run into a good monitor, is your best bet. It is the old, " Just put this in your gas tank, or use this spark plug, and you will get twice the power and twice the gas mileage" malarky. Monster cable made a fortune convincing people to buy cables with gold connectors to run audio.. LOL A sucker born every minute.

[AKar]

As stated, if it scales up better than your TV/monitor does, there would be some, perhaps marginal, visual gains.

And as stated, it would not create any data that wasn't present in the first place, only maybe up-sample more cleverly.

In my mind, I'd only run any display at its native resolution, so there would be no gains from this to me. However, if I did have a 4k display for instance and lacked the GPU horsepower to run it at native, this could do better than simply feeding, say, 1080P into the display, letting the monitor to do the up-scaling.

-Esa

[Lewis - A2A]

Yes, bobsk8, you might want to watch the video the results will surprise you. And as someone in this industry you know the one constant in IT that keeps us relevant is that change is the constant. This cable actually works when tested in tests, and that was my point of posting. That on face value its snake oil, but when tested the damn thing actually does a job. Not too much a surprise though given the technology shift the last couple years GPU and chip wise. As I say, change is the constant.

thanks,
Lewis