[geeks] Best Vista story I've seen

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 08:38:11AM -0500, Francois Dion wrote:

> The best example ever is the Gravis Ultrasound. The GF1 chip had
> independant access to memory on the card and so you could assign each
> channel it's own memory buffer (actually, multiple buffers was). Even
> at 32 channels, all you had to do to play 32 streams, was to feed the
> buffers. The card did the frequency conversion, panning and the volume
> (and a few other things), then mixed the channels into a stereo pair.
> That is why the GUS was popular with the demo scene. It left all your
> cpu cycles to do math and video.

I'm not sure that that is the best example.  I though that the
Soundblaster Live would have been a better example.

The card has a programmable DSP, that can do a lot of stuff at once.
I'm not sure if the sample engine is implemented as DSP software or is a
seperate engine like it used to be.  But anyway, some of the software
that EAX would let you stick on the card would include you playing a dry
sample at a specified 3D position, and the card would apply reverb and
mix it into surround appropriately, or optionally do virtual 3D in
stereo using HRTFs.

And of course, the card can do hardware mixing of incoming streams, as
well as act as a wavetable synth.
 
> So hardware mixing is the most common use of "accelerated" support.
> The vast majority of games nowadays however simply use wav mixing for
> sound effects, the music is all CD audio. That's a shame because the
> music is no longer interactive. If all you are doing is mixing a few
> sound effects, there is no need for hardware mixing, that is just
> trivial to do.

I thought CD Audio mostly went away some time ago, in favor of music
that could actually react to what you do and transition smoothly between
themes.  At least, that is what GDM seems to indicate.  I gave up PC
gaming some time ago and stick mostly to console gaming these days.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/