this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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And of course there was a short period of time where a sound card wasn’t required, but would actually improve performance by offloading audio processing to your sound card if you had one. And onboard audio at that time wasn’t great anyways.
You can still get discrete sound cards (both internal and USB), though they're more for audiophile stuff. With the PS5 touting big 3d audio improvements and HRTFs I half expected manufacturers to make a push to bring them back or at least feature sound features more prominantly in motherboards but I guess CPUs these days can just spare the cycles if you want fancy audio.
Generating music still benefits from offloading to discrete devices though. Like using a synth or multitrack stuff.
Modern CPUs can do all the audio processing you’d ever need (maybe barring some professional use cases like making music or editing a movie).
Audiophile external audio devices are just doing the conversion from a digital signal to an analogue signal.
Oh god AC97 era onboard audio was just bad, there was always weird glitchy sounds coming from interference elsewhere on the motherboard
Or when your mobile phone was about to ring.
That one was actually down to poorly insulated speakers and 2G phone signals dipping into the audible frequency range
And the mind blowing difference in midi quality if you heard the upgrade the first time...
we are at this point in history, but for graphics cards :)
I'll give you 4 characters: 3dfx.
Not in the same way, as you aren’t using the integrated gpu at all if you get an external one. I guess if you’re talking about shared ram this makes sense though.
I seem to recall the integrated sound wasn't used either, when I had my sound card in - the audio connectors were going directly into the sound card.
yea, IDK how it works as I've never had a computer back then, but the quoted reply makes it sound like getting a sound card would take load off of the CPU.
oh - my apologies, I forgot that on-board graphics have a dedicated chipset. Also, no idea whether on-board sound would have used CPU power back in the late days of soundcards, as the comment I responded to was claiming... might have been a sound chip for that, too..
I remember Battlefield 2 being a prime example for that. Not only did its performance improve once I added a discrete sound card, it also sounded much better.
I bought an X-Fi card just for that game.