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would it be practical to place sound on video cards?

H

her34

Senior member
in producing 3d sound for games and such, would it be practical to merge sound onto video cards?

EDIT: i was thinking practical as in good idea. i've read people speculate that with tv cables combining video&audio (like hdmi), and computers increasingly being used with tv's, this would lead to video cards adding on sound.

also that it would be more efficient for 3d gaming, to have 3d sounds calculated on video card same time as graphics.
 
Do you mean "practical" like "could they do it", or "practical" like "would it be a good idea"?

It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's a very good idea. Video cards are big, hot, and power-hungry enough as-is. And most people will update their video card more frequently than their sound card, so tying them together seems like a bit of a waste. I also don't think it would result in very much of a performance gain; it's not like the sound chip needs access to everything on the graphics card to do 3D audio.
 
It might be practical on something like onboard chips but there would be way too much heat dissipation on any addin card and would just drive the price up even more.
 
you're talking about ISA daughter cards, integrated graphics, or you must be suggesting that a standard should be implemented?

You want more transistors, more IRQ problems, a bus trying to distinguish what data contains graphics and sound, then you're looking at the possibility of a lot of heat coming from one daughter card. Even the low end version of new graphics card lines are being given larger heatsinks and fans.

Expect all developed graphics cards to have fans in the years to come. Unless it's a laptop model or the like.
 
Originally posted by: her34
in producing 3d sound for games and such, would it be practical to merge sound onto video cards?

EDIT: i was thinking practical as in good idea. i've read people speculate that with tv cables combining video&audio (like hdmi), and computers increasingly being used with tv's, this would lead to video cards adding on sound.

also that it would be more efficient for 3d gaming, to have 3d sounds calculated on video card same time as graphics.
Click to expand...
It'd be easily possible to add basic sound capabilities to a GPU but you'd run into serious difficulties with noise. Cramming a decent analogue stage isolated from electircal noise onto the same PCB would be a lot more difficult.

It'd be far more practical to have an HDMI-type output on the card and just stream the data over PCI-e, or possibly a dedicated bridge a la SLI if latency would be too high.

even 8-Channel uncompressed 24/192 sound is only about 4.6MB/s so bandwith really would never be a problem...

 
Originally posted by: Soccerman06
It might be practical on something like onboard chips but there would be way too much heat dissipation on any addin card and would just drive the price up even more.
Click to expand...
The increase in heat dissipation would be minimal. even the shiny new X-Fi can run without a heatsink so a basic on-die AC97 implementation would add very little to die size or power draw.
 
I think it could be done if there would be another cable from the graphics card. So instead of using the PCI plug-in for the sound card portion you could have something similiar to a SATA cable going onto the mother board. Sure it'd be hot and stuff but I think it could work. Would it be practical? Probably not but it's an idea.
 
Everything old is new - quite a number of companies DID put sound in with video in the earlier PC days. None of them became exactly mainstream, mostly because they couldn't offer 100% Soundblaster compatibility. In those pre-Windows days, if your drivers were not 100% SB compatible, it was likely to be difficult to get games to support your hardware.

Now that we have Windows APIs for DirectSound and such, 100% SB compatibility isn't necessary (says the man running the M-Audio card with a grin!).

However, the explosion of higher quality sound on the motherboard has really cut into the expansion soundcard market. Unless you REALLY want good sound, most people are happy if not ecstatic over the quality of mobo sound solutions these days. The only exceptions are those that need complex 7.1 positional sound in hardware (gamers) to save CPU cycles, or those that work with music and need something studio quality. And THOSE groups need sound solutions that are simply too large/electrically sensitive/space eating to put on a video card.

Future Shock
 
Actually, I have an ancient video/audio/network card somewhere....yes, all three functions on one ISA card. Don't know who made it or if it even works...but I've got one somewhere 'round here...
 
In a similar vein, I can recall reading a technology news story about a company that was aiming to introduce integrated video that equaled todays x800 and 6800 GPU processors. The timeline was a bit sketchy, but ETA, if successfully implemented, was somewhere around 2 years time.
 
I had a combo ISA card that had video (24 bit color too), sound (16bit), and joystick ports. I put it in my Amiga at the time, which only had 2 isa slots or something so i was forced to conserve slots as i needed the other slot for something else.
 
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