Quote:
Originally Posted by Tachikoma
Hmmm... I'd agree bout the positioning on Envy cards being rather bad >.> When I played halo with my AV-710... an ugly bugger ten metres away sounded like he was just next to me >.> (playing with headphones)
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Its not the fault of the card, its the drivers. There's a company called Sensaura that licenses out software-based drivers for EAX and A3d. Here's the data flow:
Game -> Sensaura DLL/SYS -> Soundcard driver (SYS) -> audio out
vs Creative:
Game -> Big Creative Driver & sound chipset -> audio out
VIA does not do any game development work in their drivers for the Envy chipsets. The Envy was supposed to be a flexible audio routing device that you could attach whatever ADC/DAC's you need to, and get audio from RAM to the analog or digital outs. It is not a DSP (digital signal processor).
Creative's cards since the Live have had a general purpose DSP built-in. They can do some audio effects in hardware. For a simple echo/reverb, this can be 100% in hardware:
- Write simple DSP program
- Load it into sound card ram
- Sound card gets audio from your system ram via DMA
- audio bits are run through DSP program
- munged bits are output through line-out
If you want to see this in action, use a Live in Linux with the emu10k development tools. You can write and load your own programs.
