Oldest cards that support HDMI \ VOGONS

Oldest cards that support HDMI

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First post, by Almoststew1990

Posted on 2021-08-19, 16:56

Almoststew1990 Offline

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I'm trying to play GTA 3 on my PC but the colours (the cars) are very dull. So I built the oldest ITX compatible PC that will work with my monitor (HDMI) and this uses a GTX645 but the colours are still dull. XP and my old hardware has in the past played GTA fine so I think the hardware or driver is just "too new".

I have older cards that I'm sure would work fine but they don't have HDMI so can't connect to my monitor. What is the oldest 'normal' card that has HDMI?

Even if I built an XP system that showed the right colours in GTA, and I used a DVI to HDMI adapter or cable and use something like my 8600GT, then it would only go up to 1080p. My screen is 1440p so it would look pretty meh. Does anyone know of a 4k (or just 1440p) capable DVI to HDMI adapter?

I am trying to avoid building a whole new PC for this so this is a Old Games on New Hardware kind of question!

Reply 1 of 5, by 386SX

Posted on 2021-08-19, 17:23

386SX Offline

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I don't know if it's the oldest but one I've got a HD3450 AGP (with on-board bridge chip) and it has the HDMI port. I think it might be one of the early card having that but I'm not sure which is the oldest one.

Last edited by 386SX on 2021-08-19, 17:44. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 5, by paradigital

Posted on 2021-08-19, 17:36

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The issue is likely to be the fact that DVI and HDMI only really remained logically the same until the need for dual-link DVI. Anything over 1080p I believe needs dual-link, at which point a passive HDMI adapter isn’t going to cut it.

I think you’ll have more luck with VGA/DSUB as this will go up to 2048x1536 iirc. You should be able to use powerstrip to set a custom resolution of 1440p

Reply 3 of 5, by libv

Posted on 2021-08-19, 19:28

libv Offline

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Actual HDMI would be a Radeon X1600/X1650 (R5xx) Comes with an external HDMI encoder. Can be had as both AGP and PCIe.
R600 (HD2xxx) came with native HDMI. Again, both AGP and PCIe available.

-- The guy who wrote the bulk of the original open source linux driver for R5xx/R6xx.

Reply 4 of 5, by libv

Posted on 2021-08-19, 19:30

libv Offline

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Btw, HDMI is electrically, both static as dynamic, compatible with DVI. HDMI just implements "extras" in the blanking area (Sound. CEC, etc).

Reply 5 of 5, by libv

Posted on 2021-08-19, 19:37

libv Offline

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Single Link DVI has a dotclock of 165MHz, iirc capable of 1900x1200 at reduced blanking. The linux command line tool cvt (which i wrote) confirms:
Modeline "1904x1200R" 152.75 1904 1952 1984 2064 1200 1203 1213 1235 +hsync -vsync

UHD (3840x2160), at reduced timing, would require 533MHz, although i am sure that there are bound to be specific VESA defined modes that have different timing from CVT.

Note that HDMI only started supporting this huge amount of bandwidth in version 2.0 in 2013.

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