Hello chrisNova777.

The most recent hardware soundfont-capable cards would be X-Fi PCI and PCIe cards. I vaguely remember that there were performance differences between PCI (EMU20K1) and PCIe (EMU20K2) versions: the former could play more voices but caused BSOD sometimes, and the latter loaded large sample banks faster but some notes were cut off in dense MIDI files. Although, this behaviour could as well be caused by different drivers, host hardware and OS used when conducting the tests.

The even more recent Audigy Rx card supports soundfonts too, because it carries an earlier-generation chip from the Audigy line. Hardware synths on Audigy and X-Fi are different, which is more or less noticeable depending on banks/instruments/songs. They also have different Reverb and Chorus presets and different reverb customization controls. X-Fi has the 3D MIDI player in addition. Overall, for normal MIDI playback I cannot say which generation would be better in any situation. And, unfortunately, you can't use Audigy and X-Fi together in a single Windows OS with Creative drivers.

HTH

What are you attempting to do? You can load a modern MIDI player that lets you select between multiple SoundFonts if you want.

You could even load a program like loopMIDI that will create a virtual MIDI port and then something like Falcosoft MIDI Player to playback whatever is captured. That will let you play a game and use whatever SoundFonts you want on any hardware.

TL;DR: Having SF2-capable sound cards is not necessary for soundfonts nowadays, but such sound cards can improve responsiveness if your CPU is relatively weak.

EMU10Kx (Live/Audigy) and EMU20Kx (X-Fi except Xtreme Audio) are the last few cards to have hardware synths. However, it seems only the EMU10Kx hardware synths were documented to some extent and supported on platforms other than Windows. I haven't found any more recent sound cards with hardware synths, and the most recent Creative lineups (using Sound Core3D) no longer have hardware synths.

With utilities like Coolsoft VirtualMIDISynth on Windows, and Timidity++ on Linux, having hardware synths is no longer necessary for using SF2 files. It's just that with supported hardware synths, MIDI processing would be handled by the sound card instead of CPU, so you have better system responsiveness and reduced latency, particularly if your CPU is weak.

A few years ago software SF2 synths (like BASSMIDI/VirtualMidiSynth) had very high CPU overhead that there were some apparent hangs/delays during MIDI playback (in some cases MIDI playback would stop completely) in some games, when using large SF2 files while having a relatively weak CPU. I once used such on a laptop with A8-3500M APU and that happened a few times in some games, especially when quickly going back and forth between certain menus that caused background music to change quickly, that the CPU is taking time (sometimes can be as long as ~1s) to process them, and eventually the MIDI playback went haywire (the music stopped working, or sounded completely messed up) that I was forced to restart the game to get music back to normal again.

That kept me from using them intensively at that time, but at present the soft synths have improved and the overall overhead can be considered good enough, as I haven't really observed any significant issues with them recently.

What do you need to run it under (95? 98? xp?). There are probably tons of capable soundcards and also a few good ones. I have used (for a long time in the past) for example Terratec EWS64. Before that Turtle Beach (various cards). Before that of course the Creative AWE-32 and Gravis Ultrasound (common denominator - every one of these had dedicated ram ranging from 2-32MB). But as someone mentioned, there are heaps of other ways to accomplish playing SF2s as long as your CPU can handle it.