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It was a big deal when Vista was released, with coincided with a lot of generational change in home computers (Watching Blu-Ray on computer still seemed to be a
by p_l 2y ago
It was a big deal when Vista was released, with coincided with a lot of generational change in home computers (Watching Blu-Ray on computer still seemed to be a thing to expect, HDMI with HDCP was introduced, etc).
There was a lot of talk about protected media path in Vista, how it linked with HDCP, how it killed hardware accelerated audio (including causing considerable death blow to promises made by OpenAL), etc.
- kalleboo 2y agoAnd Steve Jobs famously described it as a "bag of hurt"
- pjmlp 2y agoEven game consoles moved into software accelerated audio, as it turns out doing it in software, with CPU vector instructions is fast enough, while being more flexible. This is also the way of the future for graphics, do way with any kind of hardware pipelines, and go back to software rendering, but having it accelerated on the GPU, as general purpose accelerator device.
- p_l 2y agoEAX and the like were actually that - software components running on DSP inside sound card, and it was supposed that they would be something you would handle in the future akin to how GPUs are programmed. However while audio accelerators came back the protected media path business means they aren't "generally programmable" from major OS APIs even when both AMD and Intel essentially ended up settling on common architecture including ISA (Xtensa w/ DSP extensions, iirc), and are mainly handled through device specific blobs with occassional special features (like sonar style presence detection)