My last Linux box had a motherboard soundcard until (for reasons I don't recall) I upgraded it to an SB Live for not very much money. One effect of this, which surprised me, was that /dev/dsp suddenly stopped being a one-process device: where previously the second process to try to play a sound would bomb out with some sort of "device already in use" error, suddenly multiple processes were capable of opening /dev/dsp simultaneously and playing sounds of their choice, and they all came out of my speakers smoothly mixed together. Even when they had different bit depths and sample rates going in. I infer that (discarding the hypothesis that the Linux kernel contains some particularly amazing software mixing which for no adequately explained reason is only enabled for a certain subset of sound cards) the SB Live, unlike my previous sound card, has the built-in capability to support multiple sound output channels coming from the CPU and mix them in hardware, probably post-DAC.
I have no direct evidence to suggest that this would also help your gaming problems; high-end PC gaming is not my thing. But it seems plausible to me that a card which can do what I observed on my Linux box would also be able to do the thing it sounds as if you need.
This was all a few years ago, and the SB Live was cheap then. I can only assume it's either cheaper or obsolete now.
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/dev/dspsuddenly stopped being a one-process device: where previously the second process to try to play a sound would bomb out with some sort of "device already in use" error, suddenly multiple processes were capable of opening/dev/dspsimultaneously and playing sounds of their choice, and they all came out of my speakers smoothly mixed together. Even when they had different bit depths and sample rates going in. I infer that (discarding the hypothesis that the Linux kernel contains some particularly amazing software mixing which for no adequately explained reason is only enabled for a certain subset of sound cards) the SB Live, unlike my previous sound card, has the built-in capability to support multiple sound output channels coming from the CPU and mix them in hardware, probably post-DAC.I have no direct evidence to suggest that this would also help your gaming problems; high-end PC gaming is not my thing. But it seems plausible to me that a card which can do what I observed on my Linux box would also be able to do the thing it sounds as if you need.
This was all a few years ago, and the SB Live was cheap then. I can only assume it's either cheaper or obsolete now.