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SoundStorm 2: SoundStorm Strikes Back?
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix, a popular Linux-based hardware review site, has posted their beliefs on what they feel is the returning of NVIDIA's SoundStorm Technology. Even though sites have said SoundStorm is dead, Phoronix continues to believe otherwise about this long-discussed situation. They contend NVIDIA is currently working on a new generation of APUs for its upcoming Chipsets and they feel one of the audio technologies may be SoundStorm! The article can be read here, but it looks like only time will reveal if new audio features are being brought fourth in the new Chipsets."
"While we have chosen to not include the SoundStorm APU in our current nForce4 MCP, we look forward to including our audio technology in future NVIDIA products."
That's hardly dead, especially when that article if from nearly a year ago. A year is a huge timespan in computing.
The last truly inovative audio chipset was the Aureal au88x0 series, and what happened to them? Creative sucked them up and did nothing with their technology; even their "top end" Audigy 2 doesn't do positional 3D audio.
As far as the consumer is concerned, audio technology is at a plateu and it's good enough for what they're using it for. The only thing that changes in the audio hardware world are the damn hardware programatic interfaces; there are more audio chipsets than modern video cards and NIC's combined.
Soundstorm is freaking sweet though. I've used it under Mandrake and watched many movies with the nForce 2 under Windows and Linux with great results. Creative may have their heads up their asses, but Nvidia does good work on hardware and the software they release just plain works.
Surround sound is easy to setup in Windows and Linux. It's more a matter of plugging the right speakers in the right places. I love the idea that you can use an extra mic input as a center channel or something.
I wouldn't trade it in.
Get your Unix fortune now!
It's a "certification", a label that attest that the hardware follow certain specs and offer certain features (number and type of I/O connections, for example).
SeqBox
There have been a few sound musicians who have been looking at using GPU's for processing audio.
BionicFX Harnesses Power of Graphics Cards for Audio Processing
Programming uses GPU as Audio Effect Processor
BionicFX announced a technology for music production that turns NVIDIA video cards into audio effects processors. Audio Video Exchange (AVEX) converts digital audio into graphics data, and then performs effect calculations using the 3D architecture of the GPU. The latest video cards from NVIDIA are capable of more than 40 gigaflops of processing power compared to less than 6 gigaflops on Intel and AMD CPUs.
BionicReverb, the first effect to use AVEX, will debut at Winter NAMM Conference in January 2005. BionicReverb is an impulse response reverberation effect that runs as a plug-in inside VST compatible multi-track recording software. The audio effect is generated by combining an impulse response file with digital audio. Impulse response files are created by firing a starter pistol inside a location, such as Carnegie Hall, and recording the echoing sound waves. Combining the two files through mathematical convolution is a CPU intensive process that is reduced by moving expensive calculations onto the GPU.
AVEX works by transforming audio streams into the structure and colors of graphics data. The graphics data is processed on the video card by pixel or fragment shaders that run audio effect algorithms, which read and write to textures in video memory. The final calculations are retrieved from off-screen buffers and decoded into audio.
While Nvidia may be happy that these guys are using their hardware, they may be worried that these companies start mangling their own software in order for it to run on a GPU and end up doing things that will only break as graphics technology changes.
Therefore it is much safer for Nvidia to design hardware that processes audio directly.
And besides, why shouldn't audio be treated in the same way as textures? There would be many benefits if an API such as OpenAL could be implemented in hardware. All the sound files in a game could be preloaded into audio memory, along with repeat/random/play once flags, and have the programmer simply set the location of sound sources and of the listener. And this would fit neatly into a scene-graph representation.
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The last truly inovative audio chipset was the Aureal au88x0 series, and what happened to them? Creative sucked them up and did nothing with their technology; even their "top end" Audigy 2 doesn't do positional 3D audio.
As far as the consumer is concerned, audio technology is at a plateu and it's good enough for what they're using it for. The only thing that changes in the audio hardware world are the damn hardware programatic interfaces; there are more audio chipsets than modern video cards and NIC's combined.
The real problem is the disparity between those who call themselves "audiophiles" and normal users. Seriously, if 99% of users can't tell the difference between a $10 card and a $10,000 then the $10 card will always win. If the "audiophile" can tell the difference then let him pay $10,000 for a difference that doesn't mean a thing to me.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I believe what he meant was that the card manufacturer was cheap and used one physical input for both mic and one of the speaker channels.
Linux is not Windows
The Audigy 4 has recently been surpased by the X-Fi. It's an entirely new architecture, both hardware and software.
Creative's EAX has been doing positional 3D audio with occlusion and reverberation for quite a while now. The Aureal was nice, sure, but Creative has had, and has, tech that accomplishes the same thing.