[pulseaudio-discuss] Soundcard with hardware mixer

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 16.07.09 07:07, Malte Gell (malte.gell at gmx.de) wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I run pulseaudio 0.9.14 with KDE 4.3 RC2. So far it runs fine. I just wonder,
> would I benefit from a soundcard with hardware mixer? I could get a cheap
> Audigy 2 ZS.
>
> When I run Skype and listen to MP3 radio stream, the MP3 stream is fine, but
> Skype often is a bit stumbling.
>
> Currently I use a Audigy LS which has no hardware mixer. Does hwmix improve
> latencies very much?

PA does not make use of hardware mixing. And I don't plan to change
that. It's obsolete technology. CPUs these days come with extensions
such as MMX or SSE precisely for speeding up DSP tasks such as PCM
mixing. This is way more flexible that hw mixing, and definitely the
way to the future, both on the desktop and on embedded envs as well.

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
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