Sapphire has confirmed it will be the first company to offer HDMI compatible versions in its latest series of graphics accelerators to be previewed at CeBit 2006.

The Sapphire Radeon X1600Pro HDMI card is scheduled for availability in April and will deliver both audio and video to HDMI compliant displays and televisions.

The card had been also showcased at CES last year (see more information here)

The X1600 series has been designed to deliver high performance in Shader Model 3.0 and enhanced image quality. The architecture also supports ATI's Avivo technology for video playback to the latest High Definition (HD) video standards. The HDMI version is a low profile PCI Express card which supports HDCP content protection schemes. Two versions provide for either an external SPDIF or internal cable to be connected so that the audio signal is delivered over the HDMI cable.

The Sapphire RADEON X1600Pro with its 12 Pixel pipelines is equipped with 128MB of GDDR3 memory and features clock speeds of 500MHz (core) and 800MHz (memory).

Specification Summary

Chipset: RADEONX1600 Pro HDMI
Engine clock: 500 MHz
Shader units: 12
Memory clock: 800 MHz GDDR3
Memory interface: 128-bit
Memory Support: 128MB
Bus Interface: PCI Express
Variable display outputs: VGA / HDMI
Max 3D resolution: 1920x1080 (HDMI) 2048 x1536 (VGA)
Hardware Features: DirectX 9 ShaderModel 3.0
Software Feature: Avivo