I wonder what does it mean for a computer sound card to have hardware acceleration?

I know that hardware acceleration means to use hardware components (integrated circuits, sound processors, etc.) to do some functions faster than with the general purpose computer processor.

The reason why I am confused is that considering the definition of a sound card, all sound cards should have hardware acceleration. Why is this feature "hardware acceleration" listed only on some sound card specification sheets ?

1 Answer

Hardware acceleration offloads something (e.g. video decoding) from the cpu to the dedicated hardware. Something which was done in software is now done in hardware

Any hardware designed for output (graphics cards, sound cards) can output signals, but this doesn't mean their hardware can be used for 'just some calculations'.

Example without using hardware acceleration: While playing a game which uses certain DirectX technologies, your cpu might calculate surround sound, echo, ...

When using hardware acceleration, your cpu might simply hand the information to the soundcard, and the soundcard will run the algorithms for these DirectX technologies. The cpu offloads this work to the sound card, meaning the cpu has more time for other stuff.

This is a sample example (and might lack some details), but it should give you some insight in the concept.

Also note that for example Windows Vista dropped support for certain hardware accelaration for sound, since sound is relatively easy to calculate on modern processors (2ghz+, compared to a few 100mhz years ago)

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