You can still get discrete hardware that does a lot of that: offload of decoding compressed audio, adding effects, 3D positioning calculations, hardware equaliz

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.