What would be really useful to add would be HDMI audio. There are plenty of new Dolby Atmos soundbars and speaker setups hitting the market which require HDMI for audio as it carries more bandwidth for Dolby Atmos and DTS:X signals compared to optical connection.
At the moment, to get an Atmos system to work, people currently have to send the audio signal straight from the graphics card’s HDMI cable to the Monitor/TV but this isn’t ideal as it just sends a 2.0 channel signal.
People can get around this problem by hooking the graphics card HDMI up directly to an AV receiver which can upmix a 2.0 channel audio signal to a multichannel signal. But when you hook the HDMI up to the receiver instead of the monitor/TV, you miss out on G-sync and Free-sync.
The way around that problem currently is to have 2 connections coming from the graphics card. A DisplayPort to the monitor for vision plus a HDMI cable to the AV receiver for sound. This lets you use g-sync (or free-sync) AND lets you connect to your AV receiver so you can upmix your audio for surround sound. But it’s a bit of a mess because you have to pretend your AV receiver is a 2nd monitor and tell Windows to mirror the desktop to it when all you really wanted was the audio signal sent there.
If EVGA built a motherboard which had onboard HDMI audio, this cable could go straight to the AV receiver’s HDMI input socket without having to extend or mirror the desktop, as it would be a straightforward audio signal.
Just a thought.
P.S for anyone wondering - optical cables can’t carry a Dolby Atmos signal. The bandwidth is capped at 5.1 rather than 7.1 or 5.1.2 which is required for Atmos/DTS:X
post edited by Ravenmaster - Tuesday, October 08, 2019 1:01 PM