Soundstorm is gone forever

[iranu]

Tosh

[Apex]

Ditto

[StormPC]

I suppose you believe an onboard Radeon 9200 with shared memory is as fast as an AGP one? Right!

[Apex]

Nope, but your arguments over the SS don't hold any water for the vast majourity of us that are using it

[StormPC]

I never said SS was bad, just not as good as Audigy for gamers.

SS IS MUCH SLOWER however. Don't take my word for it. Check the FM ORB 3DMark03 sound benches and you'll see what I mean.

[Thorsson]

Nah, they won't do that. It's like Animal Farm here: SS Good, Audigy Bad.

[Butcher]

SS IS MUCH SLOWER however. Don't take my word for it. Check the FM ORB 3DMark03 sound benches and you'll see what I mean.

Link?
SS has hardware 3d and hardware DD encoding, so it should be of similar speed to any other sound card. I'd be interested to see any evidence to the contrary.

[Howard]

Soundstorm is the only sound chip that actually works with surround sound in games through the digital output. This makes it a lot more convenient for those people with decent home cinema systems with dedicated decoders, etc. The quality of reproduced sound is up there with, if not better than the Audigys.

The DDLive encoding is excellent

[Kumagoro]

Recently i saw an article in a magazine which tested onbaord sound versus a few pci sound cards inculding the audigy 2, in relation to games i.e. frame rate. some really cheap pci cards and onboard did bring it down slightly. Having said that they found that AC97 was near enough the same as the audigy 2 with 1 or maybe 2 fps difference.

[daniel_owen_uk]

I thought SS did hardware encoding and thus had much less of hit on CPU clock cycle than other onboard audio, so why does the performance suck?

I could be wrong on this one btw.

[Butcher]

That's the theory daniel, benchmarks on sound cards aren;t exactly a common commodity though.

[Thorsson]

SS is good with Surround Sound using the digital output, just as Howard says. It's no good for Analog, and the Surround Sound in games is variable - not in quality but in positioning. It has less of a CPU hit with digital output. I've seen a few tests that show the Audigy has a lower hit though.

If you have a "Meeja" PC then SS is a killer. If you have digital speakers then playing games is OK. If you are on analog, forget it. So it all depends on your setup and what you use your PC for.

[Howard]

It's no good for Analog

I beg to differ. I find the analog quality of SS to be very good. Maybe I forgot to add that in my post above

[Zak33]

to add my 4 penneth.

Sound Storm allowed me to comfortably suggest certain mobo's fdor the first time EVER knowing that the person could build a half decent gaming rig with no other additions...except cpu, mem etc. Even the built in Geforce 4MX was worth having. I still have one, and it plays Il2 at sensible settings with zero effort.
I'll miss the thought of Sound Storm, but I guess that its simply not financially viable anymore. If it was making them money, I bet it would be in there.

If nVidia were to take away the new Firewalls that they've integrated into their recent mobo's the same outcry would occur. And rightly too.

Problem for nVidia is that, while I'm not a fan of their cards, they DO lead the industry on lots of stuff. It is my (un proven) opinion that they like to "prove" stuff to other people.

Everybody has crap built in video...lets whoop them.
Everybody has crap built in sound....lets whoop them harder.
No one makes a mobo with affordable real bandwidth, lets do Dual Ram....lets whoop them
No one makes affordable mobo's with hardware firewalls in the net ports...lets whoop them.

So...while its sad to wave goodbye, they have done A LOT for us all.

Besides, with 64 bit processing becoming cheaper, you just wont notice a real performance hit in games from having afewclock cycles robbed from your CPU.

And surely PCI express is gonna ease upt he stress....PCI Express soundcards.

As for DD hardware EN coding.... its gone wavebye bye

[unrealrocks]

Soundstorm is the only sound chip that actually works with surround sound in games through the digital output. This makes it a lot more convenient for those people with decent home cinema systems with dedicated decoders, etc. The quality of reproduced sound is up there with, if not better than the Audigys.

The DDLive encoding is excellent

Not totally true, there is a card thats starting todo the rounds only in Malasia etc. at the moment ... it came up in another of hte SS threads, and it has DDLive encoding I think it was based on the CMedia chipsets - so not exacly brilliant

The realtime encoding isn't dead yet

BTW - I did a HUGE roundup of soundcards on AMD3D before it went under last year. It is true that on paper the Audigy2 looks the best card, and even in some benchmarks - but when I did the 3DMark sound test there was a difference of around 3fps between the Audigy2 and SoundStorm ... does that really matter? The EAX was much better across channels on the Audigy cards - in games the Audigy2 did dominate over all the cards, although for for music and DVDs I loved the SoundStorm and the mAudio Revo cards (I did have an emo card as a referance point, although it offered higher quality - although the digital out offered 8 channels per pipe and much higher dynamic range (135db IIRC - enough to max out a DAT recorder) the DolbyDigital Live encoding still *sounded* better. Without some colouring sound is worse although technically better.

[Zak33]

Rev7.1....fan club sign here.........Zak33........