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Soundcards
It seems I want a new soundcard with some hardware acceleration.
City of X, which I seem to have started playing again, doesn't have any cap on the maximum number of sounds played. In complex situations - sound on, runs like a drain. Sound off, all fine.
Currently I'm using the motherboard's AC97, which I infer is not particularly shiny. What I'm hoping one of you can tell me is this - if I want to spend a modest sum of money, like about 30 quid, is there anything I can usefully buy? I'm guessing I don't need _much_ improvement, because this only seems to affect a small number of people with ancient or basic soundcards.
City of X, which I seem to have started playing again, doesn't have any cap on the maximum number of sounds played. In complex situations - sound on, runs like a drain. Sound off, all fine.
Currently I'm using the motherboard's AC97, which I infer is not particularly shiny. What I'm hoping one of you can tell me is this - if I want to spend a modest sum of money, like about 30 quid, is there anything I can usefully buy? I'm guessing I don't need _much_ improvement, because this only seems to affect a small number of people with ancient or basic soundcards.
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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.
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I suspect you might actually find that Linux will do soft-mixing by default for less-capable sound chips these days. IIRC the ALSA guys were careful not to force software mixing (a la Windows) on in the kernel so as not to impose latency on people with decent hardware. Lately, however, it enables software mixing in the userspace libraries by default (where you can turn it off if you're doing Crazy Audio Stuff). Hence even my on-board AC97/Azalia chips are perfectly happy to play multiple streams simultaneously.
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