Benefits of PCI sound card?

[MarkAshley]

I'm already thinking about what I can buy to fill up the PCI slots on my Mediator, and I'm wondering what a PCI sound card will allow me to do that I can't already? Presumably the PCI sound card won't work in games that turn off the OS? What about MP3 playback, will the DSP chip on the PCI sound card assist the OS with decoding MP3s and make it possible to play them on my Blizzard 1240?

Thanks
Mark

[PMC]

I have a SB128 installed in my Mediator and have been largely disappointed with it's performance.  I get very noticeable slowdown when playing back Mp3 files (more so than with Paula, admittedly the quality is better though).  Very few programs seem to have hardware independent sound output, but you could theoretically onnect the phono output into one of the Soundblaster's input feeds.

The only program I have gotten good results with is Sid4Amiga.

[_ThEcRoW]

Mp3 decoding is done via cpu, sound card has nothing to do in that aspect.

[jutrem]

 I had the same question about PCI sound cards. I know with Zorro/ZII sound cards like the Delfina series you can use the card to decode mpeg audio instead of the CPU. There are plugins available. In programs like frogger (video player) you can specify Deflina, AHI, etc.  There are also mp3 decoder boxes for the parallel port but they are probably harder to find.

 Elbox were supposed to release drivers for PCI DVD/MPEG decoder cards as well.

[xaccrocheur]

_ThEcRoW wrote:
Mp3 decoding is done via cpu, sound card has nothing to do in that aspect.

Are you really 100% sure about that ? I've seen so many ads for (regular, home consumer-grade) PCI soundcards with dedicated DSP's that I lost count. My daughter's PC got a onboard soundcard on an ASUS MoBo that has TWO DSP's for, IIRC, just that, MPEG decoding...?

Because y'now, I too was wondering, and if I want something out of a PCI soundcard for my mediator, it's that : HardWare processing.

Paula rules anyway. I, for one, love you, paula. Come in my room.

[Daedalus]

Well, by and large the decoding is done by the CPU. A lot of soundcards will have DSPs on them for superior quality and speed of conversion, but it's a matter of whether drivers exist for the Amiga to be able to use them. And as regards PCI soundcards, there are none that I'm aware of. So you may buy a card with a DSP but that's only gonna sit there and do mothing while your CPU is doing the decoding.

On a side note, Paula is actually quite good, and will use less CPU time when written to directly as there's no AHI involved, but there's not a whole lot of difference there.

[billt]

> I've seen so many ads for (regular, home consumer-grade) PCI
> soundcards with dedicated DSP's that I lost count.


Just because it's there doesn't mean it's being used. There was a special mp3 player written for Delfina Plus for example, which sent mp3 data to the sound card's DSP for decoding. But you could just as well use the "unaccelerated" mpega version, decode in CPU and only send the raw audio data to the sound card for direct output without additional processing on the sound card.

If someone writes a similar special library for your card's DSP, then things could be different, but I'm not sure that AHI has any such DSP support built in. I'd love to see something like this happen.