Well crud, anyone want to buy an HD5450?

[James]

Update:

Turns out the inability to enable VAD on the 5570 was indeed a driver bug. A patch should be available shortly. it has more than enough power to handle it. Also, it turns out that the 5450 can do VAD just fine at any resolution lower than 1920x1200, which includes the standard 1920x1080 of HD displays. Gonna grab a fresh beta of the drivers and play some more this weekend. I still debate whether or not I should have gotten the 5570, but considering at 1920x1200 and lower they are more or less equal, I think I'll be OK with the 5450.

Anandtech Followup on the ATI HTPC card debacle

It turns out that the difference between rendering a 1920x1200 desktop and a 2560x1600 desktop is enough to make the 5450 start dropping frames when Vector Adaptive deinterlacing is in use. If we forced the issue by disabling ESVP, we would see a few frames get dropped in the Cheese Slices test when running at 2560x1600, but not at 1920x1200. This is actually something AMD was aware of, and as we just found out AMD has ESVP disable Vector Adaptive deinterlacing on a 2560x1600 desktop, but leaves it enabled at 1920x1200. Or in other words, the 5450 has enough compute power to do Vector Adaptive deinterlacing at HD desktop resolutions, just not at resolutions above that.