Features Overview - Audio
Ah, nForce audio, topic of many a heated online debate with regards to nForce3. The same debates will rage with nForce4, with such debates usually going something like, "OMG WTF I WANT SOUNDSTORM FFS WHAR IS IT!!111one", with the hardware Dolby encode capability of nForce and nForce2 well loved by many. That was dropped in nForce3 (all variants), replaced by a simple AC'97 interface that could be paired with any number of supporting 5.1 or 7.1 audio CODECs from the likes of Realtek or, heaven forbid, VIA.nForce4 doesn't feature SoundStorm either, so there's no Dolby encode hardware in the core logic, and the audio support in nForce4 is unchanged from what's present in nForce3. VIA's Envy24-based CODECs seem like the best pairing for an on-board solution.
As a consumer, I'd have liked to have seen encoded positional audio output as an AC3/Dolby stream as much as the next person. However, even if NVIDIA have to drop the DICE (Dolby Interactive Content Encoder) unit from nForce due to licensing costs, they could still implement hardware acceleration of DirectSound on the bridge. AC'97 output to a CODEC is all well and good, but those CODECs aren't generating the positional audio, they're just presenting it. So unless you do acceleration on the bridge, you're doing it on the CPU instead. Audigy 2 might not be excellent in terms of output quality (horrible DACs for the most part), but its DSP does accelerate positional audio, resulting in the low CPU overhead it's famous for in games.
Drop the DICE, sure, but it'd be nice if they gave us back hardware accelerated positional audio.
