3DsoundSurge Review: NVIDIA nForce APU


	Mark Muschett put's the nForce APU to the test

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NVIDIA nForce APU

Mark Muschett - Last updated February 19, 2003

Important Info:

Digital Audio System (Integrated Audio) By : NVIDIA

Price : Integrated into motherboard

API Support : DirectSound, DS3D, EAX 1.0, EAX 2.0, I3DL2, ASIO and OpenAL.

Minimum System Requirements:

Not available - however, to use the DICE feature access to a Dolby Digital decoder is necessary. Windows 98SE or newer is required. All nForce 1 and nForce 2 motherboards require AMD CPUs.

Technical Specifications

Up to 256 DSP or hardware-accelerated 2D (stereo) voices
64 DSP or hardware-accelerated 3D voices
APU supports up to 20-bit output at 48kHz if the AC 97 part supports this. Most CODECS used with the nForce are 16 bit output.
Integrated DSP based Dolby Digital Content Encoder (DICE)

Reviewers PC:

Mark
- WinXP
- AMD Athlon 2100+
- 512MB PC2100 DDR RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce 440 FX Video Card
- 60 GB EIDE Drive

A variety of speakers were used for testing including but not limited to the Swan M200 (2.0 system), MidiLand S4-8200 v2 (4 channel analog and Dolby Digital / DTS 5.1 system), VideoLogic Sirocco Crossfire and Logitech Z-560 (4.1 speaker systems), Polk Audio AMR-130, Klipsch ProMedia 5.1 and Cambridge SoundWorks MegaWorks 510D (5.1 speaker systems).

For headphones testing I used a set of Sennheiser HD525s. Digital output was tested using the MidiLand ADS-2000, 3000 and 4000 Dolby Digital decoder, the Cambridge SoundWorks DTT3500, and the Klipsch ProMedia DD-5.1 Dolby Digital / DTS decoder.

Introduction:

Through the late 90’s PC audio fans were treated to revolutionary advances, much of it driven by the often-cutthroat competition between Aureal (pushing their wavetracing technology that debuted in A3D 2.0 on Vortex 2 driven cards) and Creative Labs, pushing their EAX technology that debuted on the Live.

Today we are faced with a market where Aureal is no more and while there are several players who have stepped up to the plate to challenge Creative’s dominance there has been little evolution on the gaming front that has not been driven by Creative.

Perhaps that’s why nVidia’s entrance to the PC audio market with their nForce technology generated the significant level of excitement with PC audio and especially game enthusiasts. This excitement originated on a number of fronts.

First, there was NVIDIA’s proven track record of paying attention to the needs of gamers. Secondly there was the fall-out from Microsoft’s massive marketing efforts for the X-box launch coupled with the fact that the nForce motherboards would use the same core audio technology as the much-ballyhooed X-box.

Out of that technology we pull what has been perhaps the key excitement generator and the one that has generated the most confusion – the ability of the nForce to use Dolby Laboratories new Dolby Interactive Content Encoder (DICE) to generate in real time a Dolby Digital 5.1 encoded stream from any source material on the nForce system. This allows users who had Dolby Digital 5.1 capable multi-channel speaker systems that lacked 4 or 6 channel analog inputs to finally benefit from multi-channel gaming, exciting news indeed!

The confusion side of that equation stemmed from a mistaken belief that this process in itself would go beyond adding a new option in connectivity and improve the gaming experience over a standard 4 or 6 channel analog output system, exclusive of anything else the nForce might bring to the table. There was also a mistaken belief that games were going to have to be specially coded to take advantage of what the nForce has to offer and that newer games would require nForce technology to fully utilize the audio elements of the game.

In this reference audio processing unit (APU) review we cover in-depth just what the nForce and nForce2 motherboards, both of which use the identical audio technology, brings to the table, cutting through the hype and misconceptions. Among other things we uncover that while the high profile DICE feature works exactly as advertised there are other results that we think will even excite those gamers who don’t need the connectivity offered by the DICE. The reference review will also look at other aspects of the nForce including more details on connectivity, benchmarks, audio quality results using the RightMark tool and more. What we don't cover in our review are non-audio features. For more details on those features you can check out NVIDIA's nForce site where you can also find links to additional reviews as well as motherboard manufacturers and system builders using the nForce 1 and nForce 2.

One other thing we will mention up front is this is a lengthy review. If you don't want to read a lot then you can head straight to the last page for the overall summary, but you will by doing so miss out on the in-depth detail.

Back to the nForce Summary Page

Technical Overview --->