ASUS Announces Splendid HD1 “Video Enhance Card”

While visiting ASUS at CES this past January, I noticed the Splendid HD1 card tacked to a wall, but no one around could explain to me what it was. So here we are today… ASUS have announced the card. The problem is, many still don’t know what it is.

Essentially, the Splendid HD1 is both an upscaler and enhancer add-in card, and utilizes a PCI-E 1x port. It’s not a video card in itself, but rather contains a special chip (or chips) that can enhance the quality of any video passing through your computer. For lower-bitrate video, the card will upscale it to 1080p resolution. How well it does this is unknown, and no examples are given on the web site.

It comes down to a simple fact… this card should improve both quality and color for both games and video, although the games would not benefit from the upscaler. Rather, the card would improve the color and make the game appear better. ASUS’ Splendid software does this already, but it seems a hardware solution could improve on things even further.

All of this is tough to conclude on until we have the card in our labs, however. We should be taking a look at the card within the weeks to come, so stay tuned and we’ll let you know if it’s worth looking into. Although no price point or release date has been confirmed, we expect it to launch in late April with a sub $100 price tag.

This astounding piece of hardware is able to increase picture quality for HD content to deliver sharper, more vividly colored visual outputs. It can even enhance lower resolution inputs by recovering image clarity when viewing legacy content for viewing on LCD TV or monitors; as well as provide true HDMI with audio and HDCP.

Source: ASUS Press Release