4 ms·

Really, I thought all the basic decompression was handled on silicon by the "sound card" now, integrated or not.

by jdhawk 10y ago

khedoros1 10y ago
My sound hardware seems to have the bare minimum of ADCs, DACs, and headphone detection pins to get the audio signals in and out. The drivers that do all the heavy lifting, decoding, conversion, etc on the CPU. Why do the decoding on comparatively expensive custom silicon, when you've already got a fast and flexible CPU?
- avisser 10y ago
  > Why do the decoding on comparatively expensive custom silicon, when you've already got a fast and flexible CPU? Not a reason, but I haven't payed attention to sound cards since my Creative SoundBlaster 16. I assumed that some amount of progress/feature-creep had been made on them. If you told me I would've believed that every sound card these days had an embedded mp3 decoder as well as some 3d audio components.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    You can still get discrete hardware that does a lot of that: offload of decoding compressed audio, adding effects, 3D positioning calculations, hardware equalization, etc. Most people don't bother; I think that having a "real" sound card is kind of a small niche market right now. Going back about 15 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_Audigy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_Audigy I've got some version of that series of cards sitting in my closet. I feel like that's about when sound cards really peaked. The hardware was mature, CPUs weren't fast enough to generate all the effects games wanted on the fly, surround sound was popular, etc. It made a lot of sense to offload that stuff to an external card. Compare that to now: I've got some Chrome tab doing audio decoding, but my task manager reports 0-1% CPU use for each of my tabs. Audio decoding is fast enough to be done easily on the CPU. Ditto for the effects and such that are in use now. The equation shifted.
robryk 10y ago
Also, this is one of the cases where you can probably free up some memory bandwidth by transferring compressed samples around.

Really, I thought all the basic decompression was handled on silicon by the "sound card" now, integrated or not.

by jdhawk 10y ago

Really, I thought all the basic decompression was handled on silicon by the "sound card" now, integrated or not.

My sound hardware seems to have the bare minimum of ADCs, DACs, and headphone detection pins to get the audio signals in and out. The drivers that do all the heavy lifting, decoding, conversion, etc on the CPU. Why do the decoding on comparatively expensive custom silicon, when you've already got a fast and flexible CPU?

avisser 10y ago
> Why do the decoding on comparatively expensive custom silicon, when you've already got a fast and flexible CPU? Not a reason, but I haven't payed attention to sound cards since my Creative SoundBlaster 16. I assumed that some amount of progress/feature-creep had been made on them. If you told me I would've believed that every sound card these days had an embedded mp3 decoder as well as some 3d audio components.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  You can still get discrete hardware that does a lot of that: offload of decoding compressed audio, adding effects, 3D positioning calculations, hardware equalization, etc. Most people don't bother; I think that having a "real" sound card is kind of a small niche market right now. Going back about 15 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_Audigy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_Audigy I've got some version of that series of cards sitting in my closet. I feel like that's about when sound cards really peaked. The hardware was mature, CPUs weren't fast enough to generate all the effects games wanted on the fly, surround sound was popular, etc. It made a lot of sense to offload that stuff to an external card. Compare that to now: I've got some Chrome tab doing audio decoding, but my task manager reports 0-1% CPU use for each of my tabs. Audio decoding is fast enough to be done easily on the CPU. Ditto for the effects and such that are in use now. The equation shifted.

robryk 10y ago

Also, this is one of the cases where you can probably free up some memory bandwidth by transferring compressed samples around.