Introduction

Remember when ATI made crappy chipsets that no one bought, and all AMD systems were built with NVIDIA or even VIA chipsets? Yeah, that memory is fading for us too.

Today we get to officially unveil the 785G, the latest in integrated graphics chipsets by AMD for AMD. As the name implies, there is very little separating 785G from its predecessor (780G) and we’re quite ok with that. In fact, the only reason not to get a 780G is addressed by the 785: the new chipset supports 8-channel LPCM audio over HDMI. The lack of TrueHD and DTS-HD audio bit-streaming remains but neither is this feature supported on other chipsets. We also see a jump from HDMI 1.2 to 1.3 standards.Update: This story is developing in real time but AMD is telling us that 8-channel LPCM over HDMI is not supported in the final chipset. More info here.

The rest of the major improvements are strictly related to video playback duties. We jump from Universal Video Decoder (UVD) 1.0 on the 780G to UVD 2.0 capabilities on the 785G. The video decode engine supports decoding multiple HD streams (useful for picture-in-picture on a Blu-ray movie) and additional post processing effects if you are not a big video purist. Also new is the 785G’s ability to perform detail enhancements on the fly.

The graphics side has not really changed that much. The new GPU is based off the RV620 core and is roughly the same size/complexity as the old one. In other words we get the same 55nm node process and almost the same amount of transistors, just a tad over 205 million.The 785G’s PowerPlay technology is improved with the core constantly adjusting clock speeds based on GPU utilization with a 60MHz target when idling compared to 500MHz at full load. AMD adds DirectX 10.1 support but stream processor count and clock speeds have not changed. Thus gaming performance remains mostly unchanged.

Read the entire article on AnandTech