Although it was previously thought that ATI might be working with Realtek when it came to the audio solution on the 2x00 series, this is not the case and we've had it confirmed.

The 2x00 series will use an audio solution similar to that of ATI's now discontinued AIW cards. If you don't remember or never saw one, we can tell you that later generation of AIW cards had a coaxial S/PDIF for sound from DVD's etc.

Exactly how this is done is unclear as yet, but the rumor is that ATI is somehow using some of the DVI bandwidth to pass the audio signal from the card to the HDMI dongle.

However, this would mean that all new ATI cards will use a proprietary DVI connector, which might cause problems with third party DVI to HDMI adapters. More on this as soon as we get more information.