The Gravis Ultrasound’s main strength was that you could load samples into the card’s memory. In theory, this meant you could play tracked music that utilized its 32 hardware audio channels instead of mixing in software on the CPU.
In practice, the loop ‘click’ (as referenced in the article) was much more prominent. One of the first GUS mod players, MikMod, had to implement its own volume ramping to work around this. Tracked files with MikMod sounded great, despite the inaccuracies in reproducing the idiosyncratic differences between all the different tracked audio formats.
When the SB AWE32 and Pentium processors showed up, the advantage diminished greatly.
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The Gravis Ultrasound’s main strength was that you could load samples into the card’s memory. In theory, this meant you could play tracked music that utilized its 32 hardware audio channels instead of mixing in software on the CPU.
In practice, the loop ‘click’ (as referenced in the article) was much more prominent. One of the first GUS mod players, MikMod, had to implement its own volume ramping to work around this. Tracked files with MikMod sounded great, despite the inaccuracies in reproducing the idiosyncratic differences between all the different tracked audio formats.
When the SB AWE32 and Pentium processors showed up, the advantage diminished greatly.