5 ms·

Irrelevant, but the intro reminded me that nvidia also used to dabble in chipsets like nforce, back when there was supplier variety in such.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
SoundStorm vs Dolby is such a turning point story. Nvidia had a 5 billion op/s DSP and Dolby digital encoding on that chipset. Computers were coming into their own as powerful universal systems that could do anything. Then Dolby cancelled the license. To this day you still need very fancy sound cards or exotic motherboards to be able to output good surround sound to a large number of av receivers. There are some open DTS standards that Linux can do too, dunno about windows/Mac. But it just felt like we slid so far down, that Dolby went & made everything so much worse. (Media software can do Dolby pass-through to let the high quality sound files through, yes. But this means you can't do any effect processing, like audio normalization/compression for example. And if you are playing games your amp may be getting only basic low quality surround surround, not the good many channel stuff.)
- izacus 2y ago
  I'm bit confused about your last paragraph - what's low quality about Dolby Atmos / DTS:X output you get for games these days?
- dangsux 2y ago
  [dead]
- throwaway81523 2y ago
  Do you mean AC3? Ffmpeg has been able to do that since forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Digital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Digital
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    Theres some debate about what patents apply, but even Dolby had to admit defeat as of 2017. So yes, a 640kbit/s 6 channel format is available for encoding on ffmpeg & some others. I don't know if games are smart enough to use this? It also feels like a very low bar. It's not awful bitrate for 6 channels but neither is it great. It's not a pitiful number of channels but again neither is it great. Last & most crucially, just because one piece of software can emit ac3 doesn't make it particularly useful for a system. I should be able to have multiple different apps doing surround sound, sending notifications to back channels or panning sounds as I prefer. Yes ffmpeg can encode 5.1 media audio to an AVR but that doesn't really substitute for an actual surround system. This is more a software problem, now that the 5.1 AC3 patents are expired. And there have been some stacks in the past where this worked on Linux for example. But it seems like modern hardware (with a Sound Open Firmware) has changed a bit and PipeWire needs to come up with a new way of doing ac3/a52 encoding. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3253 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/32...
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      I once went down a rabbit hole of trying to get realtime AC3 encoding on my desktop PC, and I broadly failed. That was a long time ago. It is now 2024. Do we still need that today? For modern AVRs we have HDMI, with 8 channels worth of up to 24bit 192kHz lossless digital audio baked in. For old AVRs with multichannel analog inputs, motherboards with 6 or 8 channels of built-in audio are still common-enough, as are separate sound cards with similar functionality. What's the advantage of realtime AC3 encoding today, do you suppose?
      - throwaway81523 2y ago
        One reason to want Dolby encoding is to play back on your consumer home theater gear that decode it. Alternatively though, just don't use that kind of gear.
MegaDeKay 2y ago
One place you'll find said chipset is in the OG XBox, where they provided the Southbridge "MCPX" chip as well as the GPU. https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/#io https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/#io
m463 2y ago
I think that stopped when intel said nvidia couldn't produce chipsets for some cpu architecture they were coming out with. I don't know if this was market savvy or a footshoot that made their ecosystem weaker.
- wtallis 2y ago
  The transition point was when Intel moved the DRAM controller and PCIe root complex onto the CPU die, merging in the northbridge and leaving the southbridge as the only separate part of the chipset. The disappearance of the Front Side Bus meant Intel platforms no longer had a good place for an integrated GPU other than on the CPU package itself, and it was years before Intel's iGPUs caught up to the Nvidia 9400M iGPU. In principle, Nvidia could have made chipsets for Intel's newer platforms where the southbridge connects to the CPU over what is essentially four lanes of PCIe, but Intel locked out third parties from that market. But there wasn't much room for Nvidia to provide any significant advantages over Intel's own chipsets, except perhaps by undercutting some of Intel's product segmentation. (On the AMD side, the DRAM controller was on the CPU starting in 2003, but there was still a separate northbridge for providing AGP/PCIe, with a relatively high-speed HyperTransport link to the CPU. AMD dropped HT starting with their APUs in 2011 and the rest of the desktop processors starting with the introduction of the Ryzen family.)
  - whaleofatw2022 2y ago
    The argument was before that transition. AFAIR the contentious point was that Nvidia had a license to the bus for P6 arch (by virtue of Xbox) but did not have a license for the P4 bus. AMD was also more than happy to have NVDA build chipsets for Hammer/etc especially due to them not having a video core... -at the time-. Once the AMD/ATI merger started, that was the real writing on the wall.
    - wtallis 2y ago
      Nvidia's chipset line for Intel motherboards started with the Pentium 4. There may have been relationship issues between the two companies that prevented Nvidia from entering the Intel chipset market sooner using a derivative of their Xbox chipset, but none of that has anything to do with what ended the nForce chipsets for Intel.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

SoundStorm vs Dolby is such a turning point story. Nvidia had a 5 billion op/s DSP and Dolby digital encoding on that chipset. Computers were coming into their own as powerful universal systems that could do anything. Then Dolby cancelled the license. To this day you still need very fancy sound cards or exotic motherboards to be able to output good surround sound to a large number of av receivers. There are some open DTS standards that Linux can do too, dunno about windows/Mac. But it just felt like we slid so far down, that Dolby went & made everything so much worse. (Media software can do Dolby pass-through to let the high quality sound files through, yes. But this means you can't do any effect processing, like audio normalization/compression for example. And if you are playing games your amp may be getting only basic low quality surround surround, not the good many channel stuff.)

izacus 2y ago
I'm bit confused about your last paragraph - what's low quality about Dolby Atmos / DTS:X output you get for games these days?
dangsux 2y ago
[dead]
throwaway81523 2y ago
Do you mean AC3? Ffmpeg has been able to do that since forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Digital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Digital
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Theres some debate about what patents apply, but even Dolby had to admit defeat as of 2017. So yes, a 640kbit/s 6 channel format is available for encoding on ffmpeg & some others. I don't know if games are smart enough to use this? It also feels like a very low bar. It's not awful bitrate for 6 channels but neither is it great. It's not a pitiful number of channels but again neither is it great. Last & most crucially, just because one piece of software can emit ac3 doesn't make it particularly useful for a system. I should be able to have multiple different apps doing surround sound, sending notifications to back channels or panning sounds as I prefer. Yes ffmpeg can encode 5.1 media audio to an AVR but that doesn't really substitute for an actual surround system. This is more a software problem, now that the 5.1 AC3 patents are expired. And there have been some stacks in the past where this worked on Linux for example. But it seems like modern hardware (with a Sound Open Firmware) has changed a bit and PipeWire needs to come up with a new way of doing ac3/a52 encoding. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3253 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/32...
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    I once went down a rabbit hole of trying to get realtime AC3 encoding on my desktop PC, and I broadly failed. That was a long time ago. It is now 2024. Do we still need that today? For modern AVRs we have HDMI, with 8 channels worth of up to 24bit 192kHz lossless digital audio baked in. For old AVRs with multichannel analog inputs, motherboards with 6 or 8 channels of built-in audio are still common-enough, as are separate sound cards with similar functionality. What's the advantage of realtime AC3 encoding today, do you suppose?
    - throwaway81523 2y ago
      One reason to want Dolby encoding is to play back on your consumer home theater gear that decode it. Alternatively though, just don't use that kind of gear.

MegaDeKay 2y ago

One place you'll find said chipset is in the OG XBox, where they provided the Southbridge "MCPX" chip as well as the GPU. https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/#io https://classic.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox/#io

m463 2y ago

I think that stopped when intel said nvidia couldn't produce chipsets for some cpu architecture they were coming out with. I don't know if this was market savvy or a footshoot that made their ecosystem weaker.

wtallis 2y ago
The transition point was when Intel moved the DRAM controller and PCIe root complex onto the CPU die, merging in the northbridge and leaving the southbridge as the only separate part of the chipset. The disappearance of the Front Side Bus meant Intel platforms no longer had a good place for an integrated GPU other than on the CPU package itself, and it was years before Intel's iGPUs caught up to the Nvidia 9400M iGPU. In principle, Nvidia could have made chipsets for Intel's newer platforms where the southbridge connects to the CPU over what is essentially four lanes of PCIe, but Intel locked out third parties from that market. But there wasn't much room for Nvidia to provide any significant advantages over Intel's own chipsets, except perhaps by undercutting some of Intel's product segmentation. (On the AMD side, the DRAM controller was on the CPU starting in 2003, but there was still a separate northbridge for providing AGP/PCIe, with a relatively high-speed HyperTransport link to the CPU. AMD dropped HT starting with their APUs in 2011 and the rest of the desktop processors starting with the introduction of the Ryzen family.)
- whaleofatw2022 2y ago
  The argument was before that transition. AFAIR the contentious point was that Nvidia had a license to the bus for P6 arch (by virtue of Xbox) but did not have a license for the P4 bus. AMD was also more than happy to have NVDA build chipsets for Hammer/etc especially due to them not having a video core... -at the time-. Once the AMD/ATI merger started, that was the real writing on the wall.
  - wtallis 2y ago
    Nvidia's chipset line for Intel motherboards started with the Pentium 4. There may have been relationship issues between the two companies that prevented Nvidia from entering the Intel chipset market sooner using a derivative of their Xbox chipset, but none of that has anything to do with what ended the nForce chipsets for Intel.