The stagnation of sound card development is largely due to the diminishing demand for their specialized functions. Both sound cards and graphics cards originally provided additional processing power for real-time computation of sound and video, but their trajectories diverged because of how their respective tasks evolved.
1. The Role of Sound Cards in the Past
Historically, one of the key real-time functions of sound cards was wavetable synthesis, which involves generating music on the fly based on given instrument types and musical notes. However, this technology never saw widespread use. Why? Because most real-world applications don’t require real-time music generation—music is typically pre-composed and can be pre-recorded and stored as audio files. Since there was no need for real-time synthesis of music, there was no demand for sound cards to perform this function. Instead, audio can simply be played back from stored files.
2. Parallel with Graphics Cards
This can be compared to the world of graphics. In games, cutscenes are often pre-rendered videos, but the game itself requires real-time rendering because the player’s actions dynamically change the game’s visual output (based on position, size, direction, etc.). Real-time rendering requires substantial computational power, which is why dedicated GPUs are essential for handling these tasks.
3. Sound Effects and Audio Processing
What about sound effects? Just like music, sound effects are often pre-recorded and don’t require real-time synthesis. Even when some processing is necessary—such as placing sounds in a 3D space using technologies like OpenAL—this computation is relatively simple and can be easily handled by modern CPUs without the need for a dedicated sound card. In modern games, while images need to be computed in real-time to reflect changing in-game environments, sound is much less dynamic, with the same basic sound effects being reused under different conditions.
4. CPU Replacing Sound Cards
As audio processing tasks have become simpler or easily handled by software running on CPUs, the need for powerful sound cards has diminished. This is in contrast to graphics processing, where the computational demands continue to grow, and CPUs alone are insufficient to handle the complexity of real-time graphics rendering. As a result, GPUs have seen rapid development to meet the increasing demand for real-time rendering.
5. Why Sound Cards Stagnated
In summary, the key functions that once required sound cards—like real-time synthesis or advanced sound processing—have either become unnecessary or are now easily handled by CPUs. Because the tasks that sound cards used to perform no longer require as much computational power, sound cards have seen little innovation. Meanwhile, the need for real-time graphics rendering in gaming and other visual applications has driven the continuous advancement of graphics cards.
Simply put, the tasks that sound cards once specialized in are now easy for CPUs to manage, so sound cards stopped evolving. On the other hand, the complexity of tasks required for graphics processing has only increased, pushing the development of GPUs forward.
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