audio codecs versus controllers

[OFaceSIG]

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Audio-Codec-Comparison-Table/520/1

Now I'm fully expecting a flame war but this article brought up some good points. There are controllers and there are CODECs. 99% of motherboards now have CODECs but not controllers. Which means ANY work done logically by your "realtek" "soundcard" is being done by your CPU cause there is no hardware controller, just a codec to handle the literal i/o of your sound.

Now that being said I realize that regardless of vendor hardware accelerated DirectSound is gone. I believe most people think that means it's all CPU. My thought process is the driver work for a card with a controller is done in the controller, ala Creative X-Fi.

Also if you have a game like the Dirt2/3 series that uses OpenAL if you have a hardware controller it WILL offload all the sound work on the controller completely.

In comparison Asus Xonar which uses a Cmedia controller will have the controller do all the driver work but OpenAL games will still use the cpu for calculations but at least all the driver work is being done by the controller.

In my mind CODEC "soundcards" are the WinModems of today, it's all CPU.
Soundcards have controllers and are more USR Sportster modem and do their own work.

I'm interested to see what other people think of this article and their thoughts.

 

[OFaceSIG]

Wow what has happened to the audio portion of this forum. A year ago I would have expected the hugest troll flame war EVAR after asking a question like this, lol. Oh well just wanted other peoples opinions.

 

[Skripka]

Everything has migrated to the CPU. Given Microsoft killing hardware accelerated sound, it was inevitable sound functions would get loaded onto the CPU too. Given how much horsepower CPUs have today, it isn't that big a deal.

Article had some interesting specs, but apart from # of channels the rest doesn't tell you that much. Most audio out there isn't 192kHz, and most isn't 96kHz. The CD audio spec requires a 70dB or so SNR, so anything over that may or may not matter depending on the source as well as everything else in your setup.

 

[Snufykat]

Wow what has happened to the audio portion of this forum. A year ago I would have expected the hugest troll flame war EVAR after asking a question like this, lol. Oh well just wanted other peoples opinions.

Wait for it.... Seems to take longer to start these days but it will come.
Not such in that article other than a list of chip sets and driver names. Not much to get excited over.

 

[LinkinMcOwnage]

No codec can beat an actual chip in my opinion. Any onboard sound is pretty much guaranteed to sound like crap, no matter what quality your source files are, and no matter how good your speakers/cans are. If one part of the loop is garbage, it's all garbage. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

Not even going to comment on what MS does with every new kernel of windows (hint, the rewrite the way sound works with every kernel - to the detriment of audio quality.)