Nvidia has no counterpart to TA/TAN, but there was - not anymore - a CUDA 3D audio processing effort that then gave way to RTX cores being used as part of their VRWorks portfolio, which quickly led to Unreal Engine plug-in integration, but all of the audio stuff has been - as far as I can ascertain - completely and utterly abandoned after NVidia's second-gen RTX hardware and the overall failure of VR hardware after being introduced into the PC ecosystem, so there is no trace of it beyond archived elements from it's introduction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozhywx2YbzM

Intel has no GPU accelerated audio, but has used it's NPU hardware to accelerate audio through third-party tech, though it has fallen by the wayside and is no longer something they are pushing, with the demise of VR hardware and such efforts. The latest Razer headsets use 3D sound tech from Audioscenic, who was working with Intel's efforts into 3D sound for gaming.

https://www.youtube.com/@audioscenic/videos

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/ext … s-and-games.pdf

https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/854139/Audios … phi3D-Brief.pdf

Modern GPUs have enough horse power and flexibility to accelerate some advanced sound effect via general compute, it's not that different from GPU accelerated physics particles. Creative can't compete with that, so I don't see them designing a new DSP for gaming purposes (or any purposes really).

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2026-06-21, 19:26:

Modern GPUs have enough horse power and flexibility to accelerate some advanced sound effect via general compute, it's not that different from GPU accelerated physics particles. Creative can't compete with that, so I don't see them designing a new DSP for gaming purposes (or any purposes really).

Exactly. That would have been a total waste of time. I think the Sound Blaster brand could have been used on some kind of middleware to harness the compute\RT resources of GPUs to accelerate advanced audio features similar to what was done with Physx. If AMD and Nvidia aren't interested in promoting and actively supporting such features, then someone else could have, and Creative would have at least had some resources and brand recognition to reach game developers and possibly make it work.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-06-22, 20:06:

That would have been a total waste of time. I think the Sound Blaster brand could have been used on some kind of middleware

This is where I think you and others are wrong, and it is a massive squandered opportunity on the part of Creative. Had they started aggressively pursuing such an approach when it would have been most beneficial (1998/1999, if not somewhat earlier), and continued innovating and developing the idea, things could have been far different. The concept of dedicated sound hardware, with its own advanced capabilities specific to audio processing and modelling, could still be relevant today, with no platform developer willing to dare to even suggest that they would remove support for it. They could have been in a situation similar to the graphics companies; you couldn't imagine Microsoft (or Apple, or the relevant parties in the Linux world) now saying that, because of bloated, insecure, unstable graphics drivers, henceforth, OS support for graphics hardware will be limited to a simple frame-buffer device, and everything else will be done on the CPU, via their great software — no more video acceleration or scaling in hardware, no more pesky 3D features. The disaster that awaits Creative was pre-determined — by Creative and their own inept decisions — decades ago. Maybe that is the last bit of proof that we needed to finally admit that we should never have trusted them with the future of PC sound, that they were never really qualified to be in that industry, and that the "killer card" just happened to be a lucky guess that they still had to create by building off of Ad Lib's efforts (as additional evidence, we have the abject failure of their prior effort: the "Creative Music System"/Game Blaster).

640K!enough wrote on 2026-06-23, 05:17:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-06-22, 20:06:

That would have been a total waste of time. I think the Sound Blaster brand could have been used on some kind of middleware

This is where I think you and others are wrong, and it is a massive squandered opportunity on the part of Creative. Had they started aggressively pursuing such an approach when it would have been most beneficial (1998/1999, if not somewhat earlier), and continued innovating and developing the idea, things could have been far different. The concept of dedicated sound hardware, with its own advanced capabilities specific to audio processing and modelling, could still be relevant today, with no platform developer willing to dare to even suggest that they would remove support for it. They could have been in a situation similar to the graphics companies; you couldn't imagine Microsoft (or Apple, or the relevant parties in the Linux world) now saying that, because of bloated, insecure, unstable graphics drivers, henceforth, OS support for graphics hardware will be limited to a simple frame-buffer device, and everything else will be done on the CPU, via their great software — no more video acceleration or scaling in hardware, no more pesky 3D features. The disaster that awaits Creative was pre-determined — by Creative and their own inept decisions — decades ago. Maybe that is the last bit of proof that we needed to finally admit that we should never have trusted them with the future of PC sound, that they were never really qualified to be in that industry, and that the "killer card" just happened to be a lucky guess that they still had to create by building off of Ad Lib's efforts (as additional evidence, we have the abject failure of their prior effort: the "Creative Music System"/Game Blaster).

Of course, if Creative were given the opportunity to rewrite history starting in the mid to late 1990s, things would be different for them and the rest of the industry.

I was not going that far back, because if I did I would have preferred that Creative not even exist in the first place and that other companies would have taken computer audio in a better direction from the start.

I was talking more recently. Like, any time in the past 8-10 years since GPU compute (and ray tracing) power has been exploding, and GPUs have been available to be used for processing all kinds of complex things in real time. The hardware to do the work exists now, even if Creative destroyed any chance of dedicated sound hardware existing after gobbling up Aureal and doing almost nothing with their position through the 2000s and 2010s. So, since it exists, it would be cool if someone started doing something with it now at least. Creative could have, but they failed to even pick up the ball, yet again.

Ther's a review of the AE-X at ixbt, I'm attaching the photo of the PCB without the shield for reference.

Looking at it I see:

- Asmedia ASM3042 PCIe-USB bridge
- Realtek ALC4082 USB Codec
- ESS ES9039Q2M DAC
- Cirrus CS5361 ADC
- Comtrue CT5302 SRC/DSP chip
- The X-Amp discreete headphone amp

I get the architecture: a USB codec bolted to PCIe via a bridge, augmented with a high quality DAC and ADC. Not sure how the CT5302 fits in, is it the "Flagship Decoding Chip" that Creative shown in their marketing materials (attached)? Compared to the Audigy Fx Pro, it's basically a high-end version of this architecture.

GL1zdA wrote on Yesterday, 11:00:

Ther's a review of the AE-X at ixbt, I'm attaching the photo of the PCB without the shield for reference. […]
Show full quote

Ther's a review of the AE-X at ixbt, I'm attaching the photo of the PCB without the shield for reference.

Looking at it I see:

- Asmedia ASM3042 PCIe-USB bridge
- Realtek ALC4082 USB Codec
- ESS ES9039Q2M DAC
- Cirrus CS5361 ADC
- Comtrue CT5302 SRC/DSP chip
- The X-Amp discreete headphone amp

I get the architecture: a USB codec bolted to PCIe via a bridge, augmented with a high quality DAC and ADC. Not sure how the CT5302 fits in, is it the "Flagship Decoding Chip" that Creative shown in their marketing materials (attached)? Compared to the Audigy Fx Pro, it's basically a high-end version of this architecture.

Here's a datasheet for the CT5302/CT7302 family. It said this is a "single chip dual channel audio digital to digital bridge with sample rate converter".

I think this chip (CT5302SN in case of AE-X) is responsible for handling the bit depth and sampling rates. I wonder if it's that all the digital audio streams going inside the card get resampled to the rate you specified in the OS via this chip, before going to their destinations.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-06-23, 06:05:

Of course, if Creative were given the opportunity to rewrite history starting in the mid to late 1990s, things would be different for them and the rest of the industry.

I was not going that far back

That's the issue: it's not about re-writing history or changing what has been done; it's more about acknowledging where to assign almost all of the blame for innovation in PC audio having died (actually, having been murdered, by one particular big-name player), leaving us with nothing more than a simple, dumb digital audio output channel. There are no real modelling or processing capabilities at all. That's where we were going, and Creative systematically destroyed that.

The idea that we can just offload all of those processing duties onto the graphics hardware doesn't seem like a sustainable idea. Capabilities vary, and most of the time, developers want to use as much of its power for graphics-related computational or modelling duties, not try to manage stealing cycles for audio work, without impeding other duties.

That approach also doesn't fix the issue of actually getting the sound out to a decent set of speakers or headphones. The design pictured above is just further evidence that Creative still can't or won't do the job. We have now resorted to audio ICs intended for USB-based devices on a card with a bridge? That's the same questionable idea that they tried back in the late 90s, when trying to make the jump to PCI. It was a bad idea then, that forced them to buy Ensoniq in their inept desperation, and it's not much better now. Not a single custom chip, nothing to keep latency low (USB will make sure of that), no audio processing power; nothing at all to make it appealing, nor to stop them from going down the drain. From beginning to the bitter end, a company that steadfastly refused to innovate, even when they had opportunities presented to them on a platter, and were in the right place at the right time. May they cry through the entirety of their impending bankruptcy proceedings, all while pleading with us not to hate them forever. Unfortunately, Mr. Sim didn't live long enough to see it happen; he deserved nothing less.

640K!enough wrote on Yesterday, 21:04:

May they cry through the entirety of their impending bankruptcy proceedings

Now here's a thought... any famous retrotech YouTubers out there with the spare change to liberate the Aureal patents, à la the most recent reincarnation of Commodore?

The Aureal tech is no longer protected now, but the actual software itself is likely under some sort of legal lock and key, though I doubt CL even has anything laying around in their storage archives pertaining to Aureal, beyond whatever paperwork was signed for the buyout. The best we can probably do is reverse-engineer it and we have access to the preserved SDKs and left-over hardware for all three release versions of A3D, though they are obviously terribly out of date and not of much use on today's Windows 11 systems.

In this day and age, the only new sound technology that will be incorporated into PC gaming will have to come from a game console first.