fierydemise
Platinum Member
- Apr 16, 2005
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I remember reading that creative was working on a PCI-E soundcard, the zenith if I remember correctly
Nice in theory, but I am not all out in favor of more corporate control (DRM). DVI shall remain on my desktop for as long as possible, screw HDMI. :|Originally posted by: BikeDude
http://www.anandtech.com/multimedia/showdoc.aspx?i=2321 got me thinking that it would make sense to put sound encoding onto the graphics card. I much prefer nVidia SoundStorm over SBAudigy any day, so why not? nVidia clearly have the technology...
Heh. I just hope PCI-E offers a simple way to get rid of latency and bus use issues that have plagyed sound for years now on PCI (like skipping during heavy (PATA) drive activity, which I have still never gotten fixed on my PC).Originally posted by: ProviaFan
PCI-E could be useful if you're pulling in and sending out enough channels of 24/192, not so much that the PCI bus is limiting us now (it would take over 200 channels of 24/192 to saturate the PCI bus), but moreso that even 50 simultaneous ins and outs (100 channels) uses up enough PCI capacity that if you're trying to route those streams to a hard drive also on the same bus, you're going to be in trouble.Originally posted by: Cerb
Twice the speed down, and twice the speed back up. OK, so not so important for sound cards, but still pretty nice.Originally posted by: Continuity27That said, sound cards will eventually move to PCI-E x1, which is twice as fast as PCI. It might take a while though, because Creative is too much of a monopoly to innovate. PCI will have to live a while more.
However, anyone dealing with that many channels of audio is probably using firewire or some other proprietary connection along with an external "audio interface."
Originally posted by: Dameion
My understanding is that all pci cards share the same (limited) bandwith, which causes the slowdowns. Pci-e is supposed to operate differently. I think the the x1, x4, and x16 refer to the number of lanes dedicated to that slot, thus the amount of bandwith available to that card.
AGP only really caught on because it was genuinely necessary. There was plenty of opposition, but gamers won out, with AGP basically being a must-have just as the GF[1] was about to come out. Sound being pretty stagnant (much thanks, though, to VIA and M-Audio, for giving us some stuff that doesn't suck and has decent support) is what is keeping it from taking on PCI-E. I know I'm not the only one in the world with skipping problems (yes, I've messed around with PCI latency quite a bit), but they don't seem to care. A switch-based bus (PCI-E is kind of a shared bus and kind of point-to-point) should offer relief from such things, but we'll have to wait a year, or more, or find a PCI-E USB/FW card.Originally posted by: JAGedlion
Considering jlswier1988 doesn't seem to want to listen to what anyone else says, think of it this way and come to the conclusion yourself.
PCI express was in how many motherboards before SLI was even on the market?
Let us take a look at those motherboards, how many PCI express slots do you see?
Yea one is longer than the others but there are usually 2 or 3 in there.
Now SLI still doesn't exist, so what is that small black slot for?
It says on the spec sheet PCI express! PCI express is rather unique in that slots can range from 1x to 16x maybe even more!
Graphics cards need alot of throughput so for them we use 16x slots, or 8x if you use sli iirc.
Sound cards? Gigabit ethernet? RAID cards? These dont need as much bandwidth. Sound cards really only need a 1x slot.
You can still put them in a 16x slot if you feel like it (isn't pci express awsome) but it will still only use as much bandwith as it wants. So instead of going for an sli board which gives you another 8x (or rather 2 8x slots iirc), we can just put the sound card into our little 1x slot and be happy.
If we think about it, doesn't this make sense? After all, why would an entire bus standard require possibly proprietary technology from a graphics card manufacturer? There was a reason that the MCA bus never caught on. (If you dont know your history its because IBM made it proprietary although I guess it can be argued that there were other reasons)
Originally posted by: JAGedlion
Graphics cards need alot of throughput so for them we use 16x slots, or 8x if you use sli
Originally posted by: ProviaFan
Nice in theory, but I am not all out in favor of more corporate control (DRM). DVI shall remain on my desktop for as long as possible, screw HDMI. :|
No kidding... its like a slap in the face to people who buy the DVDs. Cause I'f I'm going to back-up my movies I'm certainly not going to back up that part of the DVD. Asses.Originally posted by: BikeDude
Originally posted by: ProviaFan
Nice in theory, but I am not all out in favor of more corporate control (DRM). DVI shall remain on my desktop for as long as possible, screw HDMI. :|
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they will screw up so that DRM is effectively optional. I quite like the idea of reducing the number of plugs! (not to mention the size of the plugs, I bet they could fit atleast three HDMI connectors on a graphics card)
As for DRM... I'm thinking of boycotting both DVD and game producers. Buying their products can be a very frustrating exercise. I need a no-CD crack to run Battlefield 2 (I don't know why yet, I suspect SafeDisc no longer supports SCSI DVD-ROM), and apparently the European release of the fifth Simpsons season features a 30+ second "thou shall not steal" non-skippable promo. I exchanged mine for the American version, so I hope that release is better. (this probably marks the end of my DVD collection ) Whatever happened to "thank you for buying our product"?
No, as far as I'm concerned, they can all burn to a crisp. Heck, I'd even supply the gasoline. (regardless of the steep oil prices)