A 16(!!!) bit ISA slot card, which revolutionized PC-audio-experience.
Are they still on the market or crashed by the ever-more-increasing onboard chips?
And there was Gravis Ultrasound, where you could upload samples into the RAM of the soundboard (that was like superpowermegatech back at these days :-) IIRC, the highest degree of fidelity was fu**ng 16 MB of onboard RAM on the soundboard.
:-D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster#Second-generatio...
Im getting old :-D
:-D
I don't think any major vendor has made ISA sound cards in almost 30 years. Discrete PCIe sound cards exist but I don't know who exactly their intended market is. Audio pros?
You can find old 90's ISA cards used on eBay and whatever. The more sought after types (e.g. SB Pro) may not be exactly cheap, though.
Also, for the retro PC market, there are hobbyist cards such as the PicoGUS. [1]
So, yes or no, depending on what you're asking for.
Most of the benefit came from the sound card doing DMA from a memory buffer instead of using a high-frequency interrupt to have the CPU give it sound samples one or two bytes at a time (fetched from the very same memory buffer(s)).
More sophisticated cards could also do mixing of several sounds in "hardware" (usually by having their own little CPU do the work) instead of having the main CPU doing the mixing. Some of them could even play the constituent sounds at different speeds (Gravis Ultra Sound and Midi cards but the Midi cards usually had fixed sound samples). This mattered for more sophisticated game audio for a few years until x86 performance improvements made it irrelevant. DMA is still crucial.
A common "Trick" was to buy cards that had essentially their own processors to handle this stuff - SoundBlasters, 3Com nics, IDE drive controllers that had their own processor (hell, even up to their own OS) since that freed the CPU up for doing actual work - gaming. Even an external or other
CPUs were a bottle neck but most people didnt tax the single core machines doing most daily work (office work, browsing the web) so it was fine, but once you load up a game that needs sound, 3d, networking, disk access all at once it would start stealing clock cycles trying to do all of that in one place.