3 ms·

There are lots of complex reasons people are postulating here, but I think it's pretty simple. The CPU can do good enough audio rendering without hardware accel

There are lots of complex reasons people are postulating here, but I think it's pretty simple. The CPU can do good enough audio rendering without hardware acceleration. The CPU can't do good enough graphics rendering without hardware acceleration. So video accelerators stayed, and sound accelerators died. Add-on sound devices still exist, but they are simple because they don't include extensive hardware acceleration anything like what a GPU has. In fact, if you want hardware acceleration for audio processing algorithms today, like really fancy 3D sound propagation or something, GPUs would actually be great at that, and they support digital audio output too.

saltcured 4y ago
Yes, I think this is about right. I see a lot of threads focusing on APIs and ignoring another thing that happened right around the late 1990s to early 2000s: MMX introduced SIMD to the PC platform. Suddenly real-time DSP algorithms were feasible for playback and synthesis on the host CPU instead of requiring a peripheral with an embedded coprocessor. This allowed soundcards to be refactored as "just" hardware IO channels, with other signal processing effects happening in the application. At roughly the same time, there were more peripheral buses like USB and Firewire being introduced, which meant that an add-on peripheral did not need to be an internal ISA/PCI card in order to have sufficient bandwidth for rich audio streams. These external devices could also be built with lower noise/interference compared to the boards inside a computer. And of course, silicon integration always increased so that the bundled onboard IO chip became good enough for many users. So, add-on peripherals had to move up market or into niche settings. That is a bit like how the iGPU in Intel CPUs got rid of the market for basic VGA/XGA/etc. graphics cards for office machines.
kllrnohj 4y ago
That's definitely missing some reasons. Back in the day onboard audio also was just terrible. Like it hissed at all volumes & other similar just bad dacs and bad amps and bad shielding problems. Which soundcards mostly all fixed. These days basic "audio correctness" is readily available from onboard audio, though. Motherboards have gotten much, much better at noise isolating the audio area, and dacs & amps have generally improved.
magicalhippo 4y ago
This coupled with noise. For those who don't care too much about noise, an onboard cheap DAC is perfectly fine. For those that care about noise, you don't want the analog audio anywhere inside the case since it's a horribly noisy place. So you get an external DAC.

saltcured 4y ago

Yes, I think this is about right. I see a lot of threads focusing on APIs and ignoring another thing that happened right around the late 1990s to early 2000s: MMX introduced SIMD to the PC platform. Suddenly real-time DSP algorithms were feasible for playback and synthesis on the host CPU instead of requiring a peripheral with an embedded coprocessor. This allowed soundcards to be refactored as "just" hardware IO channels, with other signal processing effects happening in the application. At roughly the same time, there were more peripheral buses like USB and Firewire being introduced, which meant that an add-on peripheral did not need to be an internal ISA/PCI card in order to have sufficient bandwidth for rich audio streams. These external devices could also be built with lower noise/interference compared to the boards inside a computer. And of course, silicon integration always increased so that the bundled onboard IO chip became good enough for many users. So, add-on peripherals had to move up market or into niche settings. That is a bit like how the iGPU in Intel CPUs got rid of the market for basic VGA/XGA/etc. graphics cards for office machines.

kllrnohj 4y ago

That's definitely missing some reasons. Back in the day onboard audio also was just terrible. Like it hissed at all volumes & other similar just bad dacs and bad amps and bad shielding problems. Which soundcards mostly all fixed. These days basic "audio correctness" is readily available from onboard audio, though. Motherboards have gotten much, much better at noise isolating the audio area, and dacs & amps have generally improved.

magicalhippo 4y ago

This coupled with noise. For those who don't care too much about noise, an onboard cheap DAC is perfectly fine. For those that care about noise, you don't want the analog audio anywhere inside the case since it's a horribly noisy place. So you get an external DAC.