3 ms·
This seems very off base from my recollection and the state of tech availability at the time. The "analog hole" was around for long after the release of Vista,
by majormajor 4y ago
This seems very off base from my recollection and the state of tech availability at the time. The "analog hole" was around for long after the release of Vista, with Vista maintaining support for direct multi-channel analog audio out as well as VGA/component video out at HD resolutions, but that was not a hugely mainstream thing because going analog meant by definition non-perfect results - decoding a digital stream, sending analog, then re-encoding on capture. They started laying the groundwork, but 2007 PCs and laptops didn't commonly have digital output, so playing a DVD over VGA, for instance, was extremely common still and allowed.
And beyond that, this is the first I'm seeing a claim that "doing 3d audio calculations" was restricted and that this had anything to do with intercepting pre-encoded multi-channel DVD/digital media streams. They seem completely separate from each other as far as technical pipelines go.
Sound cards as a general consumer product were dead long before Vista. The last hurrah I remember was the SBLive!/Turtle Beach Santa Cruz era 1998-2001 stuff, Vista didn't come out until 2007 (Longhorn was famously botched, etc...).
CPUs just got fast enough that all of that, including 3d calcs, could be done better on common CPU by the mid-2000s. Do it on a sound card, you have to buy a new sound card to get improvements. Do it directly in the OS or in-game, and you can benefit from improvements from the OS or library or game devs immediately.
- MAGZine 4y agoI had a decent gaming machine in 2007-2008, and, in particular I remember that Battlefield 2 sounded a LOT better with a soundcard. The difference was night and day. In particular, EAX (environmental audio extensions), which was a feature of the X-Fi cards, were definitely EOL'd due to Vista's changes around the DirectSound3D APIs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- isleyaardvark 4y agoMy recollection as well, and supported by the chart on this page showing a huge drop in sales from 2001-2003: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560... (It’s not a great chart but shows a general trend.)
- Sakos 4y ago> CPUs just got fast enough that all of that, including 3d calcs, could be done better on common CPU by the mid-2000s. Do it on a sound card, you have to buy a new sound card to get improvements. Do it directly in the OS or in-game, and you can benefit from improvements from the OS or library or game devs immediately. A dedicated chip is often better than a general purpose CPU (hello GPUs?). Game audio made a huge step back with Vista and beyond. Since audio cards could no longer do what they used to because of the limited driver model and developers/studios were more focused on graphical fidelity and physics calculations, nobody was going to waste precious CPU cycles on audio, at least not any more than the bare minimum.