silikone wrote:"Real-time" in these cases usually means "it works with whatever you feed it with, but............ you'll have to wait for some handfuls of milliseconds".
I'd love to be proven wrong with this one.
Also, I didn't realize that only the nForce2 packed this. That's kind of sad, for it really says something about its performance on the market.
Not every nForce2, only the MCP-T southbridge, which was generally used with the nF2-Ultra 400, but not universally 🙁 - on the other hand, some 'normal' nForce2 and even nForce1 boards sported the MCP-T, although given the costs involved they were rare combinations.
The 'regular' MCP southbridge just had the regular ubiquitous AC'97, just as on the nF3 and pretty much anything else from the same era. The reason for dropping the Soundstorm was cost, particularly the Dolby licensing costs.
In terms of functionality the SoundStorm compared favourably to the Creative's contemporary SBLive offerings, particularly as it supported Dolby Digital before any discrete card did. It also did A3D and EAX2 (although with higher CPU usage than an SB Audigy). As for sound quality - via digital out it was superb, but analog out relied on motherboard implementation and an external codec, which could be really good but generally wasn't, leading to all manner of noise. YMMV, look up reviews of the specific motherboard for an indication.
Note that driver support is an issue, the SoundStorm design was a one-off, with proprietary stuff all over, so no open-source (Linux/BSD) support other than bypassing the chip entirely and talking AC'97 directly to the external codec. Windows support is available from Win95 and NT4 to Vista / 2003.