Current state of sound cards?

[I4AT]

It's been a really long time since I've paid any attention to audio hardware. I have an Audigy 1 and a SB Live 5.1, both used to have hardware acceleration for EAX. That was kind of important way back in the day of Athlon XP's because it freed up a small amount of CPU cycles. As far as I understood only some Creative cards could provide hardware accelerated sound (and they even had a few cards that didn't like the Audigy SE), and then a few 3rd party manufacturers could pay for software emulated EAX which ate CPU cycles? While 3rd party cards that didn't pay Creative couldn't do EAX emulation even via software, is that right?

And then AFAIK, this now only applies to Windows XP? From what I've read ever since Vista/Win7 there's now no such thing as "hardware accelerated" sound? But EAX is still around, it's now just being offloaded to the CPU via software? So basically the X-Fi series doesn't have the same advantage the Audigy and kin used to have over other manufacturers back in the days of XP. Does that mean newer games are using their own in house effects libraries, or are developers still using EAX for the most part?

So is the only advantage of having a sound card these days over just using onboard audio a higher quality DAC + more/better capacitors etc.? If you have an audio setup that uses s/pdif or optical in does that mean you get the exact same audio quality from onboard versus a sound card because the DAC is bypassed? Or do I just not know what I'm talking about?

 

[itzbiff]

Depends on what you plan on doing with the computer.
People that game and such will like the 5.1 and 7.1 surround effects.
Others will use it specifically for music.

I currently use a Xonar DG for music listening purposes. The reason I got it was because the built in amp it had and the better DAC over my on board. Definitely improved the sound on my HFI-580s.
I could do without because of the low impedance of my cans. But other headphones absolutely need a new sound card or external DAC/amp because of their high impedance. Such as HD650s

If you want the best audio quality it would be better to bypass the card all together and go with an external DAC/amp. Such as a Fiio E17. Or a E7/E9 combo.

 

[bononos]

It's been a really long time since I've paid any attention to audio hardware. I have an Audigy 1 and a SB Live 5.1, both used to have hardware acceleration for EAX. That was kind of important way back in the day of Athlon XP's because it freed up a small amount of CPU cycles. As far as I understood only some Creative cards could provide hardware accelerated sound (and they even had a few cards that didn't like the Audigy SE), and then a few 3rd party manufacturers could pay for software emulated EAX which ate CPU cycles? While 3rd party cards that didn't pay Creative couldn't do EAX emulation even via software, is that right?

.......?

EAX is a dead standard now since Vista when Microsoft changed the way the audio stack used to work (no more kernel mode). Creative had to use openal to interface with windows. And it also inadvertently broke the stranglehold of Creative on sound acceleration. Newer games don't use EAX so you don't need a Creative card anymore.

The issue of cpu cycles is even less acute now than it was years back when the cost of cpu cycles for onboard emulated eax acceleration was still quite low.

 

[PliotronX]

EAX is a dead standard now since Vista when Microsoft changed the way the audio stack used to work (no more kernel mode). Creative had to use openal to interface with windows. And it also inadvertently broke the stranglehold of Creative on sound acceleration. Newer games don't use EAX so you don't need a Creative card anymore.

The issue of cpu cycles is even less acute now than it was years back when the cost of cpu cycles for onboard emulated eax acceleration was still quite low.

Summed up nicely. Multicore CPU = no worries. A3D could've went somewhere but Creative messed up bigtime.