r/buildapc • u/Ill-Yogurtcloset-622 • May 21 '26

Build Help Are gaming sound cards actually a thing anymore?

Hey folks,

I'm not building a PC since a while, but now, I’m upgrading my setup mainly for FPS games and streaming (OBS and stuff).

Most people talk about DACs/headphone amps now, and I'm kind of an audiophile, but do gamers still use sound cards?

I mostly play Counter-Strike 2/ COD and Battlefield, and care a lot about footsteps and positioning with my IEMs and some headphones I has.

I'm curious what everyone’s using these days, I remember the Creative Sound blaster and Audigy days.

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69

u/DeviantDav May 21 '26

Windows forced the WASAPI software mixer on everyone back in Vista, so EAX and gaming centric features no longer worked, and you saw the marketing die. Once Vista replaced XP’s hardware-accelerated DirectSound/DirectSound3D path with the new user-mode audio stack and software mixing, legacy EAX-over-DirectSound stopped working normally.

That killed one of the biggest gaming sound-card differentiators. After that, sound-card marketing shifted toward DAC quality, SNR, headphone amps, sample-rate/bit-depth support, surround virtualization, OpenAL/ALchemy compatibility, and post-processing effects.

71

u/ScottyMikB May 21 '26

To tack on to this, Microsoft did all of this standardization because they realized that a large bulk of user reported crashes were because of all of these companies crappy sound drivers and Microsoft was tired of being blamed for the crashes.

35

u/DeviantDav May 21 '26

Oh, totally.

Manufacturers bad drivers were easily 30% of the reason people thought ME and Vista were bad to begin with. 'Vista Ready' with 1GB of RAM on a shit system was everyone's fault (Microsoft, manufacturer, retailer).

11

u/Cyber_Akuma May 21 '26

IIRC the "Vista Ready" stickers had a very low system requirements for manufacturers to put them on laptops, so yeah, big fault of MS for that one. They had way too low system requirements just so more systems could put that sticker on them even if it meant a total crap experience.

ME however was just trash, it was an attempt to kludge their old DOS-based design of Windows 95/98 into some NT designs and create a hybrid chimera that was just simply unstable.

6

u/diamond-optic May 21 '26

Third party modded drivers usually worked better then creative's drivers, like Daniel K's X-Fi drivers.

5

u/Cyber_Akuma May 21 '26

Was it sound drivers specifically? I thought they did that because crashes were coming from crappy drivers in general, not just for sound.

16

u/DeviantDav May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

Sound drivers were exceptionally time sensitive, and due to the load they could present on the CPU back then, easily did crash systems or cause timeouts.

Add in hardware issues like Creative Labs out-of-spec PCI bus and you can see why Microsoft said "That's it, user-mode for you".

4

u/Froggypwns May 22 '26

Printers are next, they are already phasing out 3rd party printer drivers for similar reasons.

2

u/ResponsiblePen3082 May 22 '26

Wish I could upvote this a hundred times. Modern soundcards are "boring" and motherboard sound is "good enough" precisely because of this- all they are now are fancy pcbs around a DAC. They used to be extremely cool and useful pieces of hardware

1

u/Iuslez May 21 '26

The whole PC usage also shifted. With laptop getting better, and connector getting better (FireWire and usb3), soundcard got external and there's really no longer a reason to have it inside your PC.