It's about competition fostering support. If not customer support, at least they'll work harder to see their products don't cause problems. I'm just being optimistic
there was the mcp and mcp-2 that didnt have sound storm to be more accurate, the -t was the one you wanted if you wanted the APU.
IF nvidia had been smart they would have stuck with the orignal idea and included it on the chipset but also sold the standalone cards they had already designed, i have seen beta pci soundstorm audio cards, little buggy, but what do u expect they where beta hardware with beta driver support.....
wish nvidia would have gone that rout.
I have been hearing that AMD plans to add more DSP fetures to the cpu in the next few gen's, i been getting the impression that they would like to make it so the cpu had detocated hardware APU style support to compliment their HDMI audio thats already on their videochips, if true this could be a boon since it would also allow the use of soundstorm like setup where the external codec be it realtek or cmedia or ADI or whatever was just there as an external enterface
soundstorm was officialy mcp-t+realtek ac97 codec, some boards used cmedia chips with the mcp-t, those acctualy had better audio quility but you had to use drivers from the board maker OR install the audio codecs driver THEN the nvidia soundstorm drivers.
i have owned MANY boards and setup and tested many others, i honestly dont have a problem with any of the current HD audio chipsets in use as long as the drivers are updated properly by the chip maker OR the board maker in the case of ADI chipsets asus and intel use.
but then again most audio today is FAR diffrent from what many old skool comp geeks like us think of when we read/see "onboard sound", back in the day onboard was barly passable for use on uber crappy net machiens it aite cpu power like a mofo and sounded like a stock am/fm radio in a lowist of the low model ford festeveas, horrible horrible stuff.
now today we got MORE cpu power then is needed, and so called ac97/hdaudio codes are acctualy more powerfull in many cases then our high end soundcards of those days, Where this falls down is when you look at the drivers board makers put on the cd that comes with ur shiny new board, i just got a ta770 from biostar(kickass little board) its disk had drivers from b4 the board was even avalable.....i grabbed the current realtek drivers and installed hem and havent found any buggs since, but i know for a fact the older drivers sucked, because my last 2 boards have had realtek audio
oh, little note, if you have an OLD system thats using an old cmedia full on sound chip for its onboard and it sounds like crap, check if its the 8738, if so, check out cmedia's forums, i just recently updated the drivers on 2 old systems(1 hp one compaq), they where running 2k, so slaping in more ram and the new drivers made a world of diffrance, the old drivers sounded HORRIBLE, and the 4 and 6ch sound didnt work properly, after installing the new drivers the change is insain, you would honestly think you went from ac97 to sblive.....all from a driver update made for XP on a chip as old as the sblive........(btw, creative dumped the sblive driver support and thats when i stoped buying/using their products, i payed neerly 450usd for the sblive kit i have, sure that was years back, but i also have a cmedia based SIIG card that uses 8738 chip on it, it cost me 30bucks, and its got uptodate drivers.....that WORK......
