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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on May 14, 2002
Manufacturer: ABIT Product:
NV7-133R
nForce based motherboard
Search
for NV7-133R
prices / motherboards
price index.
(Or
APU as NVIDIA refers to it as) One of the most talked
about features of the nForce motherboard has been the
integrated audio it comes with, as also seen in
Microsoft’s Xbox. Or more specifically, the AC-3 encoding
it can perform using DICE (Dolby Digital Interactive
Content Encoder). The words real-time
AC-3/Dolby Digital encoding are more than likely
what’s going to be the one main factor driving nForce
sales given that people associated Dolby Digital with great
sound. I mean, hey, that’s what they use in the Movies
right?
The
main thing to understand is that AC-3, is much like MP3 (Bar
the multi-channel aspect of AC-3 of course) in that sense
that both are 'lossy' encoders which work on the
concept of perceptual audio encoding, i.e. removing data
which the human auditory system cannot hear. Whether or not
you’ll be able to notice any difference when using AC-3
encoding of course is another matter, but the main thing to
consider here is that AC-3 encoding will result in
data loss.
As
regards Audio streams Aureal Minerva reports the following:
-
Device
Selected: NVIDIA- nForce(TM) Audio
-
DirectSound
reports...
-
1
Primary buffer available
-
255
Total 2D hardware mixing buffers available
-
255
Static 2D hardware mixing buffers available
-
255
Streaming 2D hardware mixing buffers available
-
64
Total 3D hardware buffers available
-
64
Static 3D hardware buffers available
-
64
Streaming 3D hardware buffers available
-
0
Total bytes sound card memory static buffer storage
-
0
KB/sec Data transfer rate to hardware static buffers
-
100000
KB/sec Max sample rate supported by secondary buffers
-
100
KB/sec Min sample rate supported by secondary buffers
-
Minerva
is testing: <NVIDIA nForce(TM) Audio> for:
-
DirectSound
acceleration: <available>
-
DirectSound3D
acceleration: <available>
-
A3D
acceleration & compatibility: <not available>
Clearly
the nForce APU really is no slouch when it comes to
performance compared to most PCI Soundcards, so what’s it
like in Games?
To
test out AC-3 encoding I purchased an Optical to Coaxial
converter cable as my DTT2500 only features a Coaxial S/PDIF
input. Pleasantly enough the real-time AC-3 encoding
works with seemingly no perceivable lag in DirectSound 3D
and other extensions, e.g. EAX. Using a Sensaura engine for
Reverb & 3D positioning like, say the Santa Cruz it
offers good quality positioning & decent Reverb (Though
not to the extent of Creative’s Soundcards). That said,
despite being an AC-3 encoder, it’s only a 4.1 AC-3
encoder, i.e. No Centre channel. Based on some posts at 3D
SoundSurge NVIDIA is working to implement Sensaura
Multi-Drive 5.1 into the Drivers which will provide 5.1
output as would be expected. Being fair, this isn’t too
much of an issue as no other controller based -
Sensaura enabled soundcards offer Multi-Drive 5.1 support
either, e.g. Game Theater XP & Santa Cruz only offer
virtual 5.1 output, with the Centre being a mix of other
Channels.
Speaking
of Drivers, the APU Drivers are in my opinion very
under-developed. The simplest item which shows this is the NVIDIA
nForce APU control panel applet which contains all the
settings to configure it:
Other
than offering the ability to choose output modes there’s
no option to select other common things like Speaker mode
(2, 4 or 5.1 speakers). Similarly there’s no built-in
Volume or Tone control, which you’d find in most soundcard
drivers. Another missing feature seemingly is 6 Channel
analog output.
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