4 ms·
This is correct but there's one other part—most of the cards used to have built in midi synthesizers, but those became more or less obsolete when storage got pa
by __david__ 4y ago
This is correct but there's one other part—most of the cards used to have built in midi synthesizers, but those became more or less obsolete when storage got past a certain point. Games on CD-ROMs could just ship redbook quality audio and that's infinitely more flexible than canned standard midi sounds. CPUs got fast enough so that mixing multiple audio channels and even running effects on them wasn't taxing enough to warrant any sort of hardware acceleration, and so the AC'97 standard of just a plain stereo DAC is really all anyone ever needed at that point.
- rickdeckard 4y agoYeah, that's part of the "good enough" onboard audio. But I doubt that gaming was the key driver at that point, it surely was the demand for work PCs to play the new .wav soundeffects of Win95, which led to mediocre onboard audio with Software MIDI-synths. I vividly remember VIA onboard Audio everywhere, with gamers still putting Soundblasters in their PCs (fighting the BIOS to free up the IRQ and DMA ports) for the better quality and games still being developed for "Soundblaster 16". Good times :)