Will later Nforce boards feature Dolby Digital EX encoders?

[Legion]

Will later Nforce boards feature Dolby Digital EX encoders?

 

[Nappe1]

I highly doubt it. Dolby Laboratories is very famous on it's high license feeds, and most likely licensing costs have kept all the other manufacturers not doing Dolby Surround / Dolby ProLogic / Dolby Digital encoders on their sound cards all these years.

The reason why DD 5.1 encoder is on nForce is the XBox. it was developed for it by request of Microsoft and if nVidia doesn't do sound chip to some next generation console, they won't be doing Dolby Digital encoders for integrated audio either.

 

[Sxotty]

Ok I have a quick question, the Xbox is still in production thought so they can contiune for now right?

 

[Nappe1]

Ok I have a quick question, the Xbox is still in production thought so they can contiune for now right?

The point is that Dolby has huge fees on using some their tech on other products. While nVidia bought a license for DD 5.1 encoding algorithms, they already bought the price. So, that's the reason why they will keep it as long as possible available in as many as possible chips. (it's all income now.)

But I doubt that they are ready to buy other lisences from Dolby Labs if they do not have 100% sure customer base for it. (in this case, they had MS with XBox. porting DD 5.1 implementation on PC side was just a way using already paid tech and make some more money with it.)

so I am pretty sure that they will not remove DD 5.1 encoder, but I am also pretty sure that it will take until console with DD EX or DTS is released before we see another Home Theather sound system real-time encoder on PCs.