USAMO VS MULTICLOCK DRIVERS
USAMO VS MULTICLOCK FULL
USAMO VS MULTICLOCK PC
USAMO VS MULTICLOCK WINDOWS

They started laying the groundwork, but 2007 PCs and laptops didn't commonly have digital output, so playing a DVD over VGA, for instance, was extremely common still and allowed.Īnd beyond that, this is the first I'm seeing a claim that 'doing 3d audio calculations' was restricted and that this had anything to do with intercepting pre-encoded multi-channel DVD/digital media streams. The 'analog hole' was around for long after the release of Vista, with Vista maintaining support for direct multi-channel analog audio out as well as VGA/component video out at HD resolutions, but that was not a hugely mainstream thing because going analog meant by definition non-perfect results - decoding a digital stream, sending analog, then re-encoding on capture. This seems very off base from my recollection and the state of tech availability at the time.

USAMO VS MULTICLOCK WINDOWS

Decent positional audio can be experienced using a laptop and headphones- no sound card required.īack in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of the box and ask 'is this creative 3d? aureal?' nowadays you just plug in 5.1 to your PC's onboard audio, tell windows you have 5.1, and it works (mostly). Rare use case in the gaming world for sound cards.ĭolby Atmos is awesome for positional audio in games but there are multiple less expensive and more accessible methods for surround audio nowadays.

Gamers who want 3d/positional audio either use headphones, find the 5.1 integrated outputs to be adequate, or like me, run a digital audio cable to a surround sound receiver. Rare use case in the recording world for sound cards.Ģ.

USAMO VS MULTICLOCK PC

No matter how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI/PCIe card inside a PC for recording. People who want high quality recording shifted to firewire and later high-speed USB external audio interfaces. The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away:ġ. Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV receiver or multichannel speakers, but positional audio is still widely supported in Windows applications using Xaudio2. Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less power than a sound card.

USAMO VS MULTICLOCK FULL

>Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly. All this died and in a sense also affected video development, some features that video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules.Īs for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables. Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current ones have way less features than the ones that they made during the sound card era.ĮDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors, so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.

USAMO VS MULTICLOCK DRIVERS

When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.īut a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio calculations that were then just starting to take off, people were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio processor, and you would have games where the audio was calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions.Īfter that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless. The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules.

Usamo vs multiclock