A couple of reasons: - During the MS-DOS era, there wasn't really a standard API for sound, so using a cheap, off-brand sound chip (including anything that mig

A couple of reasons: - During the MS-DOS era, there wasn't really a standard API for sound, so using a cheap, off-brand sound chip (including anything that might be integrated) often meant compatibility problems. Even though it might not necessarily have offered the highest quality sound, Creative's Sound Blaster line was the gold standard for compatibility during this time. Standardized sound APIs have largely eliminated this issue. -Throughout the '90s, music for games (and a number of other applications) was distributed as MIDI (or MIDI-like) instructions to be generated by a synthesizer, and the quality of the music was very much dependent on the synthesizer used. The Roland Sound Canvas series was the gold standard at the time (in part due to its quality, and in part because that's what the composers themselves used), but it was very expensive and out of reach to the mass market. Software synthesizers were either too slow, or the quality sucked. That gave an opportunity for sound card manufacturers like Creative to offer higher-quality hardware synthesizers on their sound cards than what cheap/integrated cards could do. These days, most audio is PCM, and hardware is perfectly capable of high-quality software sound synthesis, so hardware synthesis has become a non-issue and modern consumer sound hardware doesn't even have hardware synthesis capabilities anymore. - During the '00s, sound cards began to offer accelerated environmental and positional audio (e.g., Aureal3D, Creative EAX), which games quickly adopted to improve the sense of immersion. However, changes in the Windows audio architecture introduced with Windows Vista broke this functionality without a replacement. Advances in CPU hardware have since allowed this type of processing to be done on the CPU (e.g., XAudio 3D, OpenAL Soft) with acceptable performance. In the current era, we do have dedicated soundcards, although not in the form of PCIe add-in boards. External DACs (either dedicated USB, or integrated into a display or AV receiver) are popular, as are the DACs used by wireless/USB headphones. Also, there has been some work done to utilize the computational capability of GPUs for real-time audio ray tracing.