NVIDIA SoundStorm

[vasdrakken]

hummm ok this was funny... "For the record, the A7N266-VM/AA has no integrated PCI devices. Its audio, IDE, LAN and so forth are native to the southbridge, leaving the PCI bus free." the PCI bus is totally dependant on the southbridge for it's bandwidth, which is why they moved the AGP bus to the north bridge, as the original AGP bus where part of the PCI bus, which also happens to be the case in that board so you have the entire south bridge's internal codec's as well as the AGP eating into your 33mHz bus... as to Nvidia's codec's they have made them avaible recently, so that mobo mkg's can incorp a retek or other chipset on the board and give you soundstorm, but they are calling it NVMixer... The new software fixed most of the issues I was having with Soundstorm, except the damm DVD are still too quite... as to creative I have an augey<sp> that is sitting on top of my dresser because I'm tired of software that gives root access to external programs live soundblasters driver pkg does!

 

[Ichinisan]

A SoundStorm software implementation is an even worse idea than not including the hardware. OEMs already include crumby CPU-dependant audio hardware, and additional software encoding would place even more load on the CPU.

 

[Pariah]

Like I said, the real-world performance is so low because the PCI bus is *already* saturated by numerous other devices (includes integrated PCI devices). Until PCI-X comes, 25-30MB/s will be a common real-world performance limitation.

Of the systems connected to my network, one has 66MHz 64bit slots and another has 33MHz 64bit slots, eliminating the PCI bus as any sort of bottleneck between those 2 systems. Again, you appear to have no experience with this hardware, and Gbe is not nearly as fast as you seem to think it is.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: jiulemoigtthe PCI bus is totally dependant on the southbridge for it's bandwidth, which is why they moved the AGP bus to the north bridge, as the original AGP bus where part of the PCI bus, which also happens to be the case in that board so you have the entire south bridge's internal codec's as well as the AGP eating into your 33mHz bus...

That's not correct, jiulemoigt. The AGP on the A7N266-VM/AA is in the northbridge as with any other AGP board. The PCI bus is hung off of the 800MB/sec Hypertransport, so the PCI bus could run at 100% load and the Hypertransport would still have plenty of capacity for IDE, LAN, USB and other southbridge functions.

 

[coolred]

I swear the more I hear about this, the less I understand.

Batmanuel, I PM'd you abotu this, but have yet to reeive a reply, so I will post in here.

The reason most HTPC users like Soundstorm is that it will encode ALL of the PCs audio streams into DD, so CDs/MP3s/DivX can be sent to the receiver in AC3 instead of being output in analog form. This is especially useful if you are using your PC as a PVR box and use it to playback recorded television on a regular basis.

I am interested in what advantage this has for PVR TV shows. I am building a multi tuner sageTV box and had dismissed the need for soundstorm, since I was under the impression it didn't do much except for games. SO are you saying that if I PVR the simpsons on a soundstorm board when I play it back through my home theater setup, it will have dedicated audo to all 6 channels? So the voices will come from the center channel, but what does it send to the others, I could see it sending all other audio to the fronts, but what does it have to send to the surrounds?

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Megatomic
We have tried this a couple of times over at nForcersHQ forums to no avail. NVidia wants to dump SoundStorm.

They do? Are they putting together another sound generator, or are they quietly leaving the PC audio arena completely?

 

[SickBeast]

Unless the PCI SoundStorm were to be sold at $50 (unlikely), the Audigy2 is the superior card, AC3 encoding aside.

 

[Accord99]

Originally posted by: coolred
I am interested in what advantage this has for PVR TV shows. I am building a multi tuner sageTV box and had dismissed the need for soundstorm, since I was under the impression it didn't do much except for games. SO are you saying that if I PVR the simpsons on a soundstorm board when I play it back through my home theater setup, it will have dedicated audo to all 6 channels? So the voices will come from the center channel, but what does it send to the others, I could see it sending all other audio to the fronts, but what does it have to send to the surrounds?

It will do nothing more than what Prologic expansion would have done to the stereo audio anyways. You are correct, the only real use of SoundStorm is when you want discrete surround audio from games in a HT setup and cannot or will not use the analog connections from the soundcard to the receiver.

 

[Ichinisan]

Originally posted by: Accord99

Originally posted by: coolred
I am interested in what advantage this has for PVR TV shows. I am building a multi tuner sageTV box and had dismissed the need for soundstorm, since I was under the impression it didn't do much except for games. SO are you saying that if I PVR the simpsons on a soundstorm board when I play it back through my home theater setup, it will have dedicated audo to all 6 channels? So the voices will come from the center channel, but what does it send to the others, I could see it sending all other audio to the fronts, but what does it have to send to the surrounds?

It will do nothing more than what Prologic expansion would have done to the stereo audio anyways. You are correct, the only real use of SoundStorm is when you want discrete surround audio from games in a HT setup and cannot or will not use the analog connections from the soundcard to the receiver.

And this is how my HTPC will be set up

I guess I'll never have a 64-bit NF3 HTPC.

 

[Accord99]

Do you want to play games with your HTPC and HT setup? Why don't you want to use the analog connections, convenience, reduce clutter or don't have the analog inputs on your receiver?

 

[coolred]

I myself would obviously prefer to use a digital connection, but could still use the analogs, but I probablly won't be gaming on my HTPC rig, and if I do it will likely be RTS's which don't really need 3D audio.

 

[BFG10K]

My guess is you haven't used the latest ones.

I never use onboard sound. PCI solutions from Creative are the best for gaming.

 

[coolred]

Nevermind,

 

[SickBeast]

NO!!! I never said anything was broadcast in Dolby Digital! Get it right before quoting me please!

I said they were broadcast in Dolby SURROUND...not Digital. Most shows are broadcast in this. The ones I regularly have watched were all the Star Trek series, The Simpsons, and The X-Files.

 

[coolred]

Dang, i thought I had it right, I edited it out as soon as I found out I misunderstood you. But with that being the case please explain again what the heck soundstorm does.

 

[SickBeast]

I'm too tired to explain it to you again. Read my post in your CPU thread. I already told you how it does it.

 

[coolred]

Yes you did tell me how it does it, but now I want to know what benefit it is, I will ask and hopefully someone else will be willing to explain it to me.

So if we stick with the simpsons, what sounds am I gonna hear coming from what speakers? I mean I don't really care if my vocals come fromt he center or from the fronts, will I actually get some sort of surround effects coming from the rear surrounds??? And if so, like what. I just can't see what surround effects there would be in a show like the simpsons.


After thinking abotu it some more, I am now leaning back towards AXP for my HTPC/PVR, and I will likely get an nForce 2 board, so it would be nice to know if soundstorm will actually benefit me.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
For the record, the A7N266-VM/AA has no integrated PCI devices. Its audio, IDE, LAN and so forth are native to the southbridge, leaving the PCI bus free. Peak PCI throughput for the nForce and nForce2 PCI bus seems to be around 120-122MB/second... here's a screenshot of Adaptec SCSIBench doing what amounts to a burst-rate test with one 15000rpm SCSI drive, hitting the PCI wall at 122MB/sec. That screenshot is from one of my nForce2 boards, but was typical of my A7N266-VM/AA's too.

Anyway, I hope nVidia does build a PCI audio card for your needs You never know, it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings

Interesting.. but didn't the NF1 chipset, suffer from extremely poor PCI-bus bandwidth, on writes? Something like like only 30MB/s?

See here and here. The second article proclaims that the issue is "solved", because writes are benchmarking at ~60MB/s, instead of being limited to ~20MB/s. That still sounds half-broken to me. I would never suggest an NF1 mobo for a rig that also wanted a PCI GbE NIC installed.

Also, what version of SCSIBench are you using? I have whatever version came with EZ-SCSI 5.02 (I think it was). Wonder if they've updated it since. I really, really, wish that they would add support for doing write-test transfers as well. I've run into an interesting issue with a recently-installed Maxtor 250GB IDE disk. I get a max read STR using HDTach 2.61 of 60MB+/s at the start of disk. But my write STR is a straight, flat line, around ~13MB/s across the whole platter. I went to load up SCSIBench to get another opinion on that drive... and then remembered that it can't do write-testing.

 

[Accord99]

Originally posted by: coolred
So if we stick with the simpsons, what sounds am I gonna hear coming from what speakers? I mean I don't really care if my vocals come fromt he center or from the fronts, will I actually get some sort of surround effects coming from the rear surrounds??? And if so, like what. I just can't see what surround effects there would be in a show like the simpsons.

You'll probably get a few environmental effects, most TV shows have support for Dolby Prologic which can generate some surround effects using two channels of audio. However, using NForce will offer no benefits as compared to simply sending the two channels of audio to your receiver and letting it apply Prologic or Prologic 2 or other upmixing algorithms. In fact, you may lose sound quality since you are encoding the audio back into a lossy format using a low quality DD encoder.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: mechBgon
For the record, the A7N266-VM/AA has no integrated PCI devices. Its audio, IDE, LAN and so forth are native to the southbridge, leaving the PCI bus free. Peak PCI throughput for the nForce and nForce2 PCI bus seems to be around 120-122MB/second... here's a screenshot of Adaptec SCSIBench doing what amounts to a burst-rate test with one 15000rpm SCSI drive, hitting the PCI wall at 122MB/sec. That screenshot is from one of my nForce2 boards, but was typical of my A7N266-VM/AA's too.

Anyway, I hope nVidia does build a PCI audio card for your needs You never know, it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings

Interesting.. but didn't the NF1 chipset, suffer from extremely poor PCI-bus bandwidth, on writes? Something like like only 30MB/s?

See here and here. The second article proclaims that the issue is "solved", because writes are benchmarking at ~60MB/s, instead of being limited to ~20MB/s. That still sounds half-broken to me. I would never suggest an NF1 mobo for a rig that also wanted a PCI GbE NIC installed.

Also, what version of SCSIBench are you using? I have whatever version came with EZ-SCSI 5.02 (I think it was). Wonder if they've updated it since. I really, really, wish that they would add support for doing write-test transfers as well. I've run into an interesting issue with a recently-installed Maxtor 250GB IDE disk. I get a max read STR using HDTach 2.61 of 60MB+/s at the start of disk. But my write STR is a straight, flat line, around ~13MB/s across the whole platter. I went to load up SCSIBench to get another opinion on that drive... and then remembered that it can't do write-testing.

My SCSIBench is what came with my old 19160... 5.01 I think? I used mine with dual 15000rpm Cheetahs as a combined fileserver and workstation until it got displaced by my 8RDA+, and I always felt that it was performing well. It was followed by two nForce2 boards and now a K8T800 board. If you're burning with the desire to know whether the A7N266-VM/AA has slow write benchmarks with PCI disk controllers, PM me and I'll arrange a test with my Cheetah 15k.3.

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: Accord99

Originally posted by: coolred
So if we stick with the simpsons, what sounds am I gonna hear coming from what speakers? I mean I don't really care if my vocals come fromt he center or from the fronts, will I actually get some sort of surround effects coming from the rear surrounds??? And if so, like what. I just can't see what surround effects there would be in a show like the simpsons.

You'll probably get a few environmental effects, most TV shows have support for Dolby Prologic which can generate some surround effects using two channels of audio. However, using NForce will offer no benefits as compared to simply sending the two channels of audio to your receiver and letting it apply Prologic or Prologic 2 or other upmixing algorithms. In fact, you may lose sound quality since you are encoding the audio back into a lossy format using a low quality DD encoder.

But it is only TV audio... so it's not really a huge deal. I :heart: my DTV stations w/ DD though.

 

[RanDum72]

Interesting.. but didn't the NF1 chipset, suffer from extremely poor PCI-bus bandwidth, on writes? Something like like only 30MB/s?

Writes on what? IDE drives? The original Nforce and to some extent the NF2 had some initial problems with drivers for their IDE controllers but as far as I know, they have been fixed. The nforce series had no problems with PCI bandwidth.

As for the Soundstorm, I wish they could have this in their NF3 chipsets. One of the things that made it so good is that it was integrated into the chipset so CPU utulization was pretty low. I don't know if a PCI version will have comparabale CPU usage but that remains to be seen.

 

[Jeff7181]

Maybe nVidia will make a PCI Express add-on sound card???

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Maybe nVidia will make a PCI Express add-on sound card???

SS is coming back and will be included in a near future nV chipset for K8.

Originally posted by: Insane3D

Originally posted by: BFG10K
AFAIK nVidia's sound drivers still have a lot of issues in games so any petition should be aimed at fixing those first.

My guess is you haven't used the latest ones. They are really quite nice, and I don't have a bit of trouble in any current games...

That's exactly right and extends to the MCP boards too. In fact, this is the first set of nV audio drivers I've chosen over the Realteks for MCP machines thanks to how solid they are.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

BTW, I think Azalia is going to rock for HTPC! It just won't be the Gamer's dream since the Codec vendors haven't announced support for anything beyond EAX 2.0 and Azalia uses Dolby's multichannel standard.