3D sound and other processing got baked into middleware for games because it became trivial to do all of the processing in software - and the processing became more advanced than anything that the sound card vendors were offering (and they didn't move quickly enough anyway).

Pro audio vastly progressed past anything that is possible to provide in fixed silicon. For input, dedicated USB (and ethernet) audio interfaces progressed to the point where it would be ridiculous to provide such functionality on a general "sound card".

It's just evolution - there just isn't a compelling enough niche for a dedicated sound card any more.

This gets annoying.

I USED to have two powerful and rather higher quality speakers attached to a creative card back in the day when I did all that with the PC though.

Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less power than a sound card.

Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV receiver or multichannel speakers, but positional audio is still widely supported in Windows applications using Xaudio2.

The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away:

1. People who want high quality recording shifted to firewire and later high-speed USB external audio interfaces. No matter how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI/PCIe card inside a PC for recording. Rare use case in the recording world for sound cards.

2. Gamers who want 3d/positional audio either use headphones, find the 5.1 integrated outputs to be adequate, or like me, run a digital audio cable to a surround sound receiver. Rare use case in the gaming world for sound cards.

Dolby Atmos is awesome for positional audio in games but there are multiple less expensive and more accessible methods for surround audio nowadays. Decent positional audio can be experienced using a laptop and headphones-- no sound card required.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Surround_sound

Back in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of the box and ask "is this creative 3d? aureal?" nowadays you just plug in 5.1 to your PC's onboard audio, tell windows you have 5.1, and it works (mostly).

USB can't offer as low latency as a piece of well-designed hardware plugged directly into your PCI bus, at least in my own limited experience. This comes into play when doing music keyboard recording.

eg. I found it difficult to find a USB MIDI adapter that didn't introduce unacceptable latency (when trying to record new tracks synced in real time to existing ones). Edirol was recommended to me but even after tweaking settings for hours it fell short. I wound up buying a second-hand Creative X-Fi Elite Pro PCIe card and love it.

I don't think it's a USB protocol problem but rather a driver/manufacturer problem.

This may be true but I've never had latency issues with USB soundcards. Right now I have a Line6 Helix Floor unit that I use to play guitar with. I can route the audio through the Helix effects, into Logic and back to Helix for more post-processing and have no latency problems.

I have had other brands and models and none introduced perceivable latency.

I don't use MIDI but I doubt it requires less latency than live guitar playing.

I had a PCIe soundcard a few years ago that made it almost impossible to get rid of ground hum though.

Last time I did audio, installing ASIO4ALL was essential.

Or get an external MIDI clock like the E-RM Multiclock and never bother about MIDI latency issues. Audio is completely fine, 30-50μs of latency won't ever be perceptible to humans, the latency of MIDI will.

In particular, the first readily available set of benchmark results I was able to find[1] suggest the difference in audio (not MIDI) latency between the lowest-latency PCIe cards and the listed USB devices (RME Fireface UFX+ USB3 and RME Babyface Pro [USB2]) is under a millisecond.

While I couldn't find similar results for MIDI I/O, it seems unlikely that either of these USB devices' MIDI interfaces would introduce an order of magnitude more latency than their audio counterparts.

[1] https://gearspace.com/board/showpost.php?p=15796206&postcoun...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/heres-a-list-...

Then there's Korg's Oasys PCI, which was so powerful that for a long time people kept using Windows 98 after Korg stopped making drivers: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/korg-oasys-pci

So USB is pretty good, and for most sound card, USB2 is enough. Otherwise you can go Thunderbolt, which offer on par experience with PCIe.

What a consumer sound card offer now a day is better dac compare to the one of your motherboard or better output for headset.

Ok, I just checked, and a 192kHz 24-bit WAV file is only 0.56 MB per sec. Nice.

...in part because there's no way to do that, and if you do it by using the headphone jack, in addition to low quality you're also going to get all system sounds

I don't think most people know what spidf toslink or RCA even are.

And beyond that, this is the first I'm seeing a claim that "doing 3d audio calculations" was restricted and that this had anything to do with intercepting pre-encoded multi-channel DVD/digital media streams. They seem completely separate from each other as far as technical pipelines go.

Sound cards as a general consumer product were dead long before Vista. The last hurrah I remember was the SBLive!/Turtle Beach Santa Cruz era 1998-2001 stuff, Vista didn't come out until 2007 (Longhorn was famously botched, etc...).

CPUs just got fast enough that all of that, including 3d calcs, could be done better on common CPU by the mid-2000s. Do it on a sound card, you have to buy a new sound card to get improvements. Do it directly in the OS or in-game, and you can benefit from improvements from the OS or library or game devs immediately.

In particular, EAX (environmental audio extensions), which was a feature of the X-Fi cards, were definitely EOL'd due to Vista's changes around the DirectSound3D APIs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560...

(It’s not a great chart but shows a general trend.)

A dedicated chip is often better than a general purpose CPU (hello GPUs?). Game audio made a huge step back with Vista and beyond. Since audio cards could no longer do what they used to because of the limited driver model and developers/studios were more focused on graphical fidelity and physics calculations, nobody was going to waste precious CPU cycles on audio, at least not any more than the bare minimum.

3D audio on the PC was deliberately killed by Creative.

They sued Aureal into bankruptcy, bought it in the court auction, and the day the sale closed they nuked the support website and took the drivers offline.

They used similar scummy tactics to decapitate any other competitors. Then they considered their reverb based spatial audio solution sufficient, and promptly sat on their heels doing zero innovation while collecting a rent.

And them as chip technology improved, a basic "Soundblaster 64" chip became so cheap that motherboard manufactures started bundling it in as a selling point (which made a ton of sense for non gaming PC users btw). Additionally MS stepped in and provided some software spatial functionality within DirectX, as processors had improved to the point where dedicated hardware for it wasn't necessary.

Back then I worked in gamedev, and I briefly considered going into competition with MILES et all with a 3D audio library after the Aureal fiasco, after I stumbled on some interesting papers doing Fresnel Zone Tracing variations as low overhead spatial audio, but ultimately wasn't serious about it vs other options at the time.

Ie, Steam Audio: https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/

Which papers were they, if you recall?

To be fair, realtime synthesis just became obsolete for most purposes once CD quality digitized audio became cheap enough to store (and later, to stream). And for musicians, once CPUs became fast enough, SW synthesis with its limitless possibilities took over from HW synthesis.

I think full 3d audio is a different problem though because it, at least, requires a version of the rendering problem (for waves). It's harder in some ways than light rendering (because phase/coherence matters sometimes, the wave equation is harder to solve), but easier in others (no need as much detail as light, wavelength is large), or just plain weird (nonlinear effects from rattling and such).

Or there’s still some “generic” box (I mean that you can program yourself) like the Symbolic Sound Kyma Capybara. They’re quite niche thought, like modular synth.

There are always slightly harder, and better ways of doing something which the accelerators are better at. Audio acceleration I guess peaked too early or they just couldn't get the tech demos as impressive as graphics.

I remember reading about a demo, which I believe was from Matrox. They managed to get an audio 3D environment working over a pair of stereo headphones which was good enough that you could play Doom headless. Just close your eyes and you could tell where people were.

A lot of what I read about here is that prerecorded samples is good enough, in the same way that raster lighting is good enough and raytracing is a waste of time.

It is cheap enough that it is bundled with everything. But that doesn't make it better than a discrete GPU/Audio chip.

Intel GPUs are barely good enough to run an OS desktop yet they hold the majority of the market.

Creative drivers were a double digit % of all Windows BSODs. Microsoft gave Creative plenty of time to fix their drivers, creative never did, so sound drivers got booted from the kernel.

Whether Dolby Atmos has improved since then or other games have implemented it better I don't know. I feel like we probably need an open source implementation middleware for object sound to headphone/surround speakers to really fix the situation.

If you never seen a system BSODing from the sound drivers - I'm glad for you. I've seen enough sound card drivers crashes to tell you what that WAS a problem. Along with network cards, video cards, TV-tuner cards and almost anything what needed a driver.

> After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.

Discrete sound cards became pointless because by 2001 almost every consumer motherboard had an AC'97 compatible audio coded on board.

So if you didn't need super extra fidelity 5.1235435 sound system AND didn't want to shell out additional ~$100 (SB Live! in 1999) or $2-300 (SB Audigy 2 in various variants, 2003) - you just could use the onboard one.

> having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.

NO THANKS: https://youtu.be/3AZI07_qts8?t=9

And this is a Creative card! I had my share of good synthesized music (because computers couldn't yet do a proper digitized sounds yet), but the tech should had die and it did.

Games ended up congealing around the Sound Blaster standard, which put Creative in the centre of the sound universe. Everyone else was always just "SB compatible", which meant they were playing for the "$10 placeholder sound card" market in the Pentium days. By the time we were getting onboard audio (I think my first board with it was Socket A), it was all hidden behind DirectX, and the market became the "90 cent placeholder chip soldered onto the mobo" market, and then they're all undercut by Realtek.

Unfortunately, Creative is a mediocre steward of the premium-sound landscape. Their product matrix is complicated, support is all over the place, and the drivers are sketchy. I have an Audigy RX that I pulled out of circulation because it could crash two different boards (B550 and X570) and the general consensus was just "they're not that compatible."

I suppose that market technically didn't crush everyone else, there was still the pro-audio market, but that had entirely different needs than a typical home enthusiast. If you're building a studio PC to run specific studio software, you can put up with a narrow compatibility list and finickiness.

But it feels like there's a reasonable niche there for the "eager to throw money around" audiophile crowd. Cards full of high-markup capacitors and filters so you can claim to offer cleaner power and a lower noise floor seem tailor-made to unlocking those wallets. Where is that card? Although I suspect for that audience, they just pipe out stuff via optical to an external DAC because the inside of the PC must be full of RFI.

For the masses, the high end today is mostly encompassed by a USB headphone DAC. Headphones get you high quality in a small form factor, and a headphone DAC doesn't need a lot of power or I/O. Once you go bigger, again, physical experience takes hold. People want their vinyl collections and so forth in their listening room, and thus where there's demand for digital, it's usually outside of the classic PC form factor too - it could be an iPhone and a Bluetooth speaker, or a dedicated receiver for the home theater setup. Going this route means it can(if built carefully) avoid crashes and updates interrupting the experience.

[0] e.g. early versions of Pro Tools https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2018/3/27/a-brief...

It’s a shame because I would love more audio sources to support HRTF (head related transfer function) and “ray traced” audio.

The game deliberately includes many sound sources to facilitate this such as stepping on various surfaces, glass shards on the ground, and wildlife making noise based on player proximity.

This works amazingly well on regular, on-board PC sound chips, though headphones are quite mandatory.

(Disclaimer: not affiliated, just a fan).

Higher order ambisonics strikes a pretty good balance in terms of spatial resolution while still being a mixed signal. You can then pair it with objects for specific highlights. Atmos is a 7.1.4 static bed plus dynamic objects, so similar idea. In either case, most of these 3D sound systems support very few dynamic objects. For example, Windows Sonic only supports 15 dynamic objects on Xbox: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/coreaudio/spa...

drivers live in the kernel, and prior to Windows Vista, they had the same rights as the kernel. pre-Windows Vista, a driver could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything it wanted to anywhere it wanted. the driver architecture change fixed this gaping security hole, while still allowing drivers to exist.

drivers needed to be rewritten to accommodate LARGE changes to how they needed to do their work, and the result of that is that drivers which interacted with hardware directly no longer could, they had to ask the kernel to do stuff, and the kernel could say “no.” imagine being a driver maintainer and needing to react to this change.

this change often required a complete rewrite of the driver. this is why drivers of the era were so feature-limited.

this architecture change allowed kernel-level DRM drivers to become a thing, but DRM would have happened with or without any changes to driver arch, i assure you.

everyone suddenly needing to rewrite their drivers is what caused drivers to appear limited in the new paradigm. it simply took time to reimplement everything that existed in the old driver model, and people wanted working drivers before everything was implemented in the new drivers.

This is a thing too, but the main problem was what a kernel level drivers not only could, but WOULD crash the kernel (ie cause a BSOD) if something goes wrong. And things gone wrong very, very often.

People like to bitch about changes in NT6+, but I have seen waaay less BSODs (not related to the botched hardware) after that.