What is the hardware buffering of a sound card

Hello! Depending on the IO control method, there are two ways to implement buffering, one is to use a dedicated hardware buffer, such as the data buffer register in the IO controller. Another method is to set aside a dedicated buffer with n cells in memory to store input and output data.

Memory buffers are also known as'Software buffering'.Hardware buffers are configured in the device for a purpose, transparent to the processor, and do not require direct management by the operating system. Most I/O devices have their own hardware buffers (keyboard, graphics card, sound card).

Software buffers are designed to compensate for the lack of hardware buffers. One of the most important is the input-output buffering, which is used to improve the speed mismatch between the processor and the input/output device. The specific implementation includes single buffer (input and output devices share a buffer and can only work serially), double buffer (can realize the parallel input and output of input and output), multiple buffer and buffer pooling and other technologies.

Character devices and block devices often have different buffers. These buffers are set up, scheduled, and protected by the operating system's buffer management.

I also looked up Microsoft's direct application manual, and the hardware buffer of the sound card application is not necessarily the memory that comes with the sound card (of course, the high-end sound card has memory), but a specific area is drawn out in the memory, and the sound card is directly operated, and does not go through the operating system. In fact, this explains why we can see that many onboard sound cards also support hardware buffering.

When you initialize DirectSound, it automatically creates a master buffer for your program, which is used to mix the sound and send it to the output device. In addition to the main buffer, the program should at least create a secondary buffer, which stores the sounds that will be used, and can be released when not in use (although this implies that the main buffer is non-disable).

In an application, there can be two types of secondary buffering – static buffering (a memory space, a full sound; The advantage is that all the sounds can be stored in the buffer at one time) and the stream buffer (not all the data is read into the buffer at once, but dynamically read in the ** sound; The advantage is that they take up less space), and they can be adapted to different program needs individually.

sound), then using static buffering is more helpful to improve the efficiency of the program, on the contrary, if it is very verbose**, it is better to use streaming buffering.

It seems that we still need the sound card to support hardware buffering, especially in games, and the other 3D special effects are very buffer-consuming, and all the special effects must be completed in the buffer, which also leads to the high occupancy of the CPU by the sound card in many cases.

This article is written by: Lysley.

Compose. I hope my answer is helpful to you and I wish you a happy life!

Check the sound card driver in Device Manager to see if it's working!

The literal meaning is actually similar to that of lz, as for the solution, you can** the corresponding auxiliary tools (because it is very tiring to check the model of the sound card, you have to find a small chip on the motherboard).

lz can be.

If you have any questions, you can chat with me privately, and I can help you remotely! (Previously added as a friend).