The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules.
When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.
But a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio calculations that were then just starting to take off, people were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio processor, and you would have games where the audio was calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions...
After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.
Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current ones have way less features than the ones that they made during the sound card era.
EDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors, so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. All this died and in a sense also affected video development, some features that video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules.
As for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables.
This is nonsense. The main reason behind the demise of dedicated sound cards: motherboard sound chipsets got "good enough". The value add wasn't adding enough value any more because you can get decent sound quality just by using the default sound output provided by your motherboard.
3D sound and other processing got baked into middleware for games because it became trivial to do all of the processing in software - and the processing became more advanced than anything that the sound card vendors were offering (and they didn't move quickly enough anyway).
Pro audio vastly progressed past anything that is possible to provide in fixed silicon. For input, dedicated USB (and ethernet) audio interfaces progressed to the point where it would be ridiculous to provide such functionality on a general "sound card".
It's just evolution - there just isn't a compelling enough niche for a dedicated sound card any more.
This is the answer. The only people buying dedicated sound cards these days are those doing audio engineering or production work, needing access to dedicated inputs and interfaces. Motherboard sound chipsets cover nearly every other use case.
Correct. Same thing has happened with GPUs. The vast majority of general purpose computers sold today come with integrated graphics. Only those who have unusually heavy 3D graphics needs, like CAD or the latest games at full quality, still buy a discrete video card.
To add to this - I have a dedicated sound card on my desktop - it lives inside the USB tiny dongle of my gaming headset and makes it emulate surround sound a little bit better. My two tinny tiny speakers are connected to the onboard audio output.
Anything I watch, I watch on the TV, or via a bluetooth headset on the phone or tablet.
Anything I listen to, I listen to on the phone via aforementioned bluetooth headset, or the nice big non-mobile bluetooth speaker.
I USED to have two powerful and rather higher quality speakers attached to a
creative card back in the day when I did all that with the PC though.
>Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less power than a sound card.
Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV receiver or multichannel speakers, but positional audio is still widely supported in Windows applications using Xaudio2.
The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away:
1. People who want high quality recording shifted to firewire and later high-speed USB external audio interfaces. No matter how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI/PCIe card inside a PC for recording. Rare use case in the recording world for sound cards.
2. Gamers who want 3d/positional audio either use headphones, find the 5.1 integrated outputs to be adequate, or like me, run a digital audio cable to a surround sound receiver. Rare use case in the gaming world for sound cards.
Dolby Atmos is awesome for positional audio in games but there are multiple less expensive and more accessible methods for surround audio nowadays. Decent positional audio can be experienced using a laptop and headphones-- no sound card required.
Back in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of the box and ask "is this creative 3d? aureal?" nowadays you just plug in 5.1 to your PC's onboard audio, tell windows you have 5.1, and it works (mostly).
No matter how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI/PCIe card inside a PC for recording
USB can't offer as low latency as a piece of well-designed hardware plugged directly into your PCI bus, at least in my own limited experience. This comes into play when doing music keyboard recording.
eg. I found it difficult to find a USB MIDI adapter that didn't introduce unacceptable latency (when trying to record new tracks synced in real time to existing ones). Edirol was recommended to me but even after tweaking settings for hours it fell short. I wound up buying a second-hand Creative X-Fi Elite Pro PCIe card and love it.
Usually the software using the interface (pro tools / ableton) has settings to tweak audio latency via buffer size for audio. I have not had issue with this or midi, and I record a fair amount. Motu makes a good cheap audio usb-c interface.
> USB can't offer as low latency as a piece of well-designed hardware plugged directly into your PCI bus, at least in my own limited experience.
This may be true but I've never had latency issues with USB soundcards. Right now I have a Line6 Helix Floor unit that I use to play guitar with. I can route the audio through the Helix effects, into Logic and back to Helix for more post-processing and have no latency problems.
I have had other brands and models and none introduced perceivable latency.
I don't use MIDI but I doubt it requires less latency than live guitar playing.
I had a PCIe soundcard a few years ago that made it almost impossible to get rid of ground hum though.
I also have latency issues with USB soundcards and MIDI devices, specifically. Tried multiple vendors and in each one introduced ~100-200 milliseconds of delay. The old PCI SoundBlaster Audigy card I had 20 years ago with a the standard DIN MIDI interface was orders of magnitude better, even running Windows XP.
MIDI latency is a pain in the ass, audio latency is negligible with any USB soundcard I've used, buffer sizes and latency compensation in DAWs matter. Adjusting your MIDI timing to compensate the jittery of MIDI on a PC is also important.
Or get an external MIDI clock like the E-RM Multiclock and never bother about MIDI latency issues. Audio is completely fine, 30-50μs of latency won't ever be perceptible to humans, the latency of MIDI will.
This is emphatically not true for USB interfaces in general.
In particular, the first readily available set of benchmark results I was able to find[1] suggest the difference in audio (not MIDI) latency between the lowest-latency PCIe cards and the listed USB devices (RME Fireface UFX+ USB3 and RME Babyface Pro [USB2]) is under a millisecond.
While I couldn't find similar results for MIDI I/O, it seems unlikely that either of these USB devices' MIDI interfaces would introduce an order of magnitude more latency than their audio counterparts.
USB is purely pooled by the host, no Bus Mastering, no DMA. Bunch of frequent interrupts (125us uSOF) that need to be handled by the CPU. USB 2.0 is so heavy its mere presence in a computer (idle pooling something plugged in) visibly slows down any <1GHz computer (halving IDE transfers for example https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=89651). Users didnt notice because 2.0 started showing up in 2002 together with >2GHz CPUs.
For playing older games that relied on that hardware, sure soundfonts aren't a great replacement. But modern games moved away from needing to use a soundcard audio engine and are just able to completely do it on the CPU, and the only real benefit of the soundcard at that point is the latency/dac/amp
I have sub 5ms latency with my RME sound card, could probably go lower. What will hurt after a long while is the bandwidth at 192khz plus some other protocol on top (clock syncing, midi…). But we’re speaking of more than 64 channel in AND out.
So USB is pretty good, and for most sound card, USB2 is enough. Otherwise you can go Thunderbolt, which offer on par experience with PCIe.
What a consumer sound card offer now a day is better dac compare to the one of your motherboard or better output for headset.
> Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV receiver or multichannel speakers
...in part because there's no way to do that, and if you do it by using the headphone jack, in addition to low quality you're also going to get all system sounds
Maybe I am self selecting, but I don't think I have seen a desktop computer or motherboard in the last 15 years without spidf over toslink or RCA. Hell, for that matter a bunch of laptops and even apple until recently included mini toslink/optical out the headphone jack.
I've got an ancient Yamaha 5.1 receiver with no HDMI. I'm sending it audio from a Raspberry Pi4 behind my screen through a cheap USB 7.1 audio card using regular RCA connectors. The extra 2 channels are duplicates of the stereo input (using pulseaudio) and get sent to a stereo amp that goes to 4 ceiling speakers in the adjoining room. I've found that far more reliable than spdif. For example, I can download all of the Dolby test files (including their latest Atmos stuff) and I get 5.1 audio from my old receiver. Using spdif I don't.
I can tell that analog-only motherboard audio is very common even if it doesn't make sense. This was the biggest filter when I was selecting my motherboard, limited the available options just to a handful (within reasonably priced boards, expensive top end of course has all bells and whistles).
This might be due to computers and headphones becoming portable. When I was a kid my PC had a soundblaster connected to a hacky 7.1 setup in my room, and counterstrike supported it.
This seems very off base from my recollection and the state of tech availability at the time. The "analog hole" was around for long after the release of Vista, with Vista maintaining support for direct multi-channel analog audio out as well as VGA/component video out at HD resolutions, but that was not a hugely mainstream thing because going analog meant by definition non-perfect results - decoding a digital stream, sending analog, then re-encoding on capture. They started laying the groundwork, but 2007 PCs and laptops didn't commonly have digital output, so playing a DVD over VGA, for instance, was extremely common still and allowed.
And beyond that, this is the first I'm seeing a claim that "doing 3d audio calculations" was restricted and that this had anything to do with intercepting pre-encoded multi-channel DVD/digital media streams. They seem completely separate from each other as far as technical pipelines go.
Sound cards as a general consumer product were dead long before Vista. The last hurrah I remember was the SBLive!/Turtle Beach Santa Cruz era 1998-2001 stuff, Vista didn't come out until 2007 (Longhorn was famously botched, etc...).
CPUs just got fast enough that all of that, including 3d calcs, could be done better on common CPU by the mid-2000s. Do it on a sound card, you have to buy a new sound card to get improvements. Do it directly in the OS or in-game, and you can benefit from improvements from the OS or library or game devs immediately.
I had a decent gaming machine in 2007-2008, and, in particular I remember that Battlefield 2 sounded a LOT better with a soundcard. The difference was night and day.
In particular, EAX (environmental audio extensions), which was a feature of the X-Fi cards, were definitely EOL'd due to Vista's changes around the DirectSound3D APIs.
> CPUs just got fast enough that all of that, including 3d calcs, could be done better on common CPU by the mid-2000s. Do it on a sound card, you have to buy a new sound card to get improvements. Do it directly in the OS or in-game, and you can benefit from improvements from the OS or library or game devs immediately.
A dedicated chip is often better than a general purpose CPU (hello GPUs?). Game audio made a huge step back with Vista and beyond. Since audio cards could no longer do what they used to because of the limited driver model and developers/studios were more focused on graphical fidelity and physics calculations, nobody was going to waste precious CPU cycles on audio, at least not any more than the bare minimum.
3D audio on the PC was deliberately killed by Creative.
They sued Aureal into bankruptcy, bought it in the court auction, and the day the sale closed they nuked the support website and took the drivers offline.
They used similar scummy tactics to decapitate any other competitors. Then they considered their reverb based spatial audio solution sufficient, and promptly sat on their heels doing zero innovation while collecting a rent.
And them as chip technology improved, a basic "Soundblaster 64" chip became so cheap that motherboard manufactures started bundling it in as a selling point (which made a ton of sense for non gaming PC users btw). Additionally MS stepped in and provided some software spatial functionality within DirectX, as processors had improved to the point where dedicated hardware for it wasn't necessary.
Back then I worked in gamedev, and I briefly considered going into competition with MILES et all with a 3D audio library after the Aureal fiasco, after I stumbled on some interesting papers doing Fresnel Zone Tracing variations as low overhead spatial audio, but ultimately wasn't serious about it vs other options at the time.
> Back then I worked in gamedev, and I briefly considered going into competition with MILES et all with a 3D audio library after the Aureal fiasco, after I stumbled on some interesting papers doing Fresnel Zone Tracing variations as low overhead spatial audio, but ultimately wasn't serious about it vs other options at the time.
> or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
To be fair, realtime synthesis just became obsolete for most purposes once CD quality digitized audio became cheap enough to store (and later, to stream). And for musicians, once CPUs became fast enough, SW synthesis with its limitless possibilities took over from HW synthesis.
Something like (fragment?) shaders for audio would be amazing though. Or maybe just an embedded low power CPU (running realtime). I think there's a lot of room for generative audio still (or various degrees of "rendering audio"), or applying distortions like doppler, various reverbs, or just generating things on the fly via synthesis, you can do things like make each effect unique and have various custom parameters (material pairs, impact velocity, room conditions, etc.).
I think full 3d audio is a different problem though because it, at least, requires a version of the rendering problem (for waves). It's harder in some ways than light rendering (because phase/coherence matters sometimes, the wave equation is harder to solve), but easier in others (no need as much detail as light, wavelength is large), or just plain weird (nonlinear effects from rattling and such).
There’s still sound card with programmable DSP, quite often used to replicate high end effects. They cost a lot - and every plug-in are specialized to a brand. Still quite useful because the quality of those are very high, and don’t impact the recording process.
Or there’s still some “generic” box (I mean that you can program yourself) like the Symbolic Sound Kyma Capybara. They’re quite niche thought, like modular synth.
Also, disk space became cheap enough that the game could store audio files (such as MP3s) instead of generating the audio on the fly by the sound card. I remember Age of Empires (released 1997) music were MIDI files and the "instruments" would be changed by the game's code to make the music sound much better. EverQuest (1999) also started with MIDI files but later expansions replaced the music with MP3 files.
Surely this is like the raytracing scenario for GPUs.
There are always slightly harder, and better ways of doing something which the accelerators are better at. Audio acceleration I guess peaked too early or they just couldn't get the tech demos as impressive as graphics.
I remember reading about a demo, which I believe was from Matrox. They managed to get an audio 3D environment working over a pair of stereo headphones which was good enough that you could play Doom headless. Just close your eyes and you could tell where people were.
A lot of what I read about here is that prerecorded samples is good enough, in the same way that raster lighting is good enough and raytracing is a waste of time.
Sure, that's what I meant by "once CD quality digitized audio became cheap enough to store". Both the fact that once games started to be shipped on CD, they could literally play audio tracks straight from the CD, and the fact that faster CPUs and better codecs made it feasible to ship compressed audio and decode it in realtime.
> The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn't because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules.
Creative drivers were a double digit % of all Windows BSODs. Microsoft gave Creative plenty of time to fix their drivers, creative never did, so sound drivers got booted from the kernel.
The best of competitive sound now is the Sennheiser GSX which is an external USB DAC/Amp. It has a good 7.1 to headphones mode that gets you about the best surround sound on headphones for games/movies you can get, it impacts the tone the least and has one of the best HRTF's I have heard in eyars. But it pales in comparison to the cards we had 20 years ago, I miss my Aureal A3D.
Ditto, I can't say how much of it is pure nostalgia, but I feel like Counter Strike 1.x on my old Turtle Beach Montego II gave better positional sound than any game/hardware does nowadays.
The differences may be all in my head, but I've been very happy with a USB Dragonfly DAC and a pair of quality headphones, along with high/master quality input.
In Overwatch it was when I tried that a few years ago. While Atmos gave you some sense of vertical positioning generally it wasn't correct and I struggled with positioning. Theoretically Atmos ought to be miles better, its object based like the sound cards of the early 2000s but in practice they have got something wrong in the headphones implementation and positioning is hard to pick out. Its better than just stereo but the positioning is a lot better on the Sennheiser device.
Whether Dolby Atmos has improved since then or other games have implemented it better I don't know. I feel like we probably need an open source implementation middleware for object sound to headphone/surround speakers to really fix the situation.
> I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.
If you never seen a system BSODing from the sound drivers - I'm glad for you. I've seen enough sound card drivers crashes to tell you what that WAS a problem. Along with network cards, video cards, TV-tuner cards and almost anything what needed a driver.
> After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.
Discrete sound cards became pointless because by 2001 almost every consumer motherboard had an AC'97 compatible audio coded on board.
So if you didn't need super extra fidelity 5.1235435 sound system AND didn't want to shell out additional ~$100 (SB Live! in 1999) or $2-300 (SB Audigy 2 in various variants, 2003) - you just could use the onboard one.
> having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
And this is a Creative card! I had my share of good synthesized music (because computers couldn't yet do a proper digitized sounds yet), but the tech should had die and it did.
Games ended up congealing around the Sound Blaster standard, which put Creative in the centre of the sound universe. Everyone else was always just "SB compatible", which meant they were playing for the "$10 placeholder sound card" market in the Pentium days. By the time we were getting onboard audio (I think my first board with it was Socket A), it was all hidden behind DirectX, and the market became the "90 cent placeholder chip soldered onto the mobo" market, and then they're all undercut by Realtek.
Unfortunately, Creative is a mediocre steward of the premium-sound landscape. Their product matrix is complicated, support is all over the place, and the drivers are sketchy. I have an Audigy RX that I pulled out of circulation because it could crash two different boards (B550 and X570) and the general consensus was just "they're not that compatible."
I suppose that market technically didn't crush everyone else, there was still the pro-audio market, but that had entirely different needs than a typical home enthusiast. If you're building a studio PC to run specific studio software, you can put up with a narrow compatibility list and finickiness.
But it feels like there's a reasonable niche there for the "eager to throw money around" audiophile crowd. Cards full of high-markup capacitors and filters so you can claim to offer cleaner power and a lower noise floor seem tailor-made to unlocking those wallets. Where is that card? Although I suspect for that audience, they just pipe out stuff via optical to an external DAC because the inside of the PC must be full of RFI.
I think part of the issue is that once you get super picky about audio quality - whether from a producer or listener perspective - you also want a physical experience. You want a box with knobs and buttons on it, lots of I/O, wireless capabilities and whatever other features. The classic PC sound card wasn't that; it did make the PC play and record stuff, but it was positioned as a way for consumers to play games and for professionals to record demos(before taking it to a real recording studio). The professional digital recording systems were sold as whole systems, of which a PC could be one part, but always had a proprietary hardware element as well. [0]
For the masses, the high end today is mostly encompassed by a USB headphone DAC. Headphones get you high quality in a small form factor, and a headphone DAC doesn't need a lot of power or I/O. Once you go bigger, again, physical experience takes hold. People want their vinyl collections and so forth in their listening room, and thus where there's demand for digital, it's usually outside of the classic PC form factor too - it could be an iPhone and a Bluetooth speaker, or a dedicated receiver for the home theater setup. Going this route means it can(if built carefully) avoid crashes and updates interrupting the experience.
The PS5 has an audio chip loosely based on the design of the PS3’s Cell CPU. It’s used to compute HRTF 3D audio. It’s really cool, but it’s basically the only modern example (not sure what Apple is doing for it’s 3D audio) and of course it’s a console so it’s not a separate, user replaceable sound card.
It’s a shame because I would love more audio sources to support HRTF (head related transfer function) and “ray traced” audio.
Games can have HRTF if the developers want to include it, it doesn't take a fancy sound card to make it happen. Counter-Strike Global Offensive had an update a few years ago to implement HRTF, its now labeled as the "3D Audio" option in the game. It works on pretty much any modern sound card.
+1. It may not he HRTF, but the game with by far the best positional audio at the moment appears to be Crytek's Hunt: Showdown. Sounds can be pin pointed with amazing accuracy. Often times, one can shoot blindly through a wall just based on the noise an opponent makes, and score hits.
The game deliberately includes many sound sources to facilitate this such as stepping on various surfaces, glass shards on the ground, and wildlife making noise based on player proximity.
This works amazingly well on regular, on-board PC sound chips, though headphones are quite mandatory.
Thank you. Are you able to adjust the positional audio to “better fit” your ears? The PS5 comes with a few presets but unfortunately it feels like my ears are somewhere between two of the presets, so for one sound sources feel lower than they should while the next the feel higher than they should (compared to a reference sound that is ear-level).
That chip is responsible for much more than HRTFs too. It can handle a huge amount of 3D audio-related DSP effects and decoding which are all way more compute intensive than the HRTF, which is performed once at the very end of the signal chain for the headphones.
How would HRTF be 'performed once at the very end of the signal chain'? Dont you have to transform every individual signal/position before mixing? On the other hand I read somewhere ATMOS is encoded as an array of filters with positions, so decoding is merely a fourier decomposition, would love to learn more about that.
There are a few different models at play: surround sound like 5.1, 7.1, ambisonics and the 7.1.4 Atmos static bed; and object-based where mono point source sounds are attached to a location. The former traditional models can be interpreted as individual objects positioned at the speaker locations and folded down to stereo passing through the HRTF that way. It’s a mixed signal so it really is at the end of the chain. For object-based, those are more precisely located but have other downsides (e.g. they break our mixing concepts for things like compression and reverb) and each object would need to be upmixed to binaural stereo through the HRTF.
Higher order ambisonics strikes a pretty good balance in terms of spatial resolution while still being a mixed signal. You can then pair it with objects for specific highlights. Atmos is a 7.1.4 static bed plus dynamic objects, so similar idea. In either case, most of these 3D sound systems support very few dynamic objects. For example, Windows Sonic only supports 15 dynamic objects on Xbox:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/coreaudio/spa...
Thank you. Do you know if Sony has publicly released any more technical documentation about it? I know Sony put out that video with Cerny around the time of the PS5’s release, but I don’t know if there has been anything else.
ok you are SUPER misinformed about the motivation for the driver architecture change.
drivers live in the kernel, and prior to Windows Vista, they had the same rights as the kernel. pre-Windows Vista, a driver could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything it wanted to anywhere it wanted. the driver architecture change fixed this gaping security hole, while still allowing drivers to exist.
drivers needed to be rewritten to accommodate LARGE changes to how they needed to do their work, and the result of that is that drivers which interacted with hardware directly no longer could, they had to ask the kernel to do stuff, and the kernel could say “no.” imagine being a driver maintainer and needing to react to this change.
this change often required a complete rewrite of the driver. this is why drivers of the era were so feature-limited.
this architecture change allowed kernel-level DRM drivers to become a thing, but DRM would have happened with or without any changes to driver arch, i assure you.
everyone suddenly needing to rewrite their drivers is what caused drivers to appear limited in the new paradigm. it simply took time to reimplement everything that existed in the old driver model, and people wanted working drivers before everything was implemented in the new drivers.
> a driver could easily be malicious and exfiltrate anything it wanted to anywhere it wanted
This is a thing too, but the main problem was what a kernel level drivers not only could, but WOULD crash the kernel (ie cause a BSOD) if something goes wrong. And things gone wrong very, very often.
People like to bitch about changes in NT6+, but I have seen waaay less BSODs (not related to the botched hardware) after that.
So funny you mention the whole 3D sound thing because I recall at least two computers I bought in the 90s having demo "games" where you flew a bee or something around in order to hear how 3D it was
Very true for PCs but it’s starting to shift with both consoles and receivers with Atmos decoders. For example, the PS5 has a custom audio DSP chip with 3D sound capabilities for reverberation, spatialization and more.
When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.
But a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio calculations that were then just starting to take off, people were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio processor, and you would have games where the audio was calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions...
After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.
Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current ones have way less features than the ones that they made during the sound card era.
EDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors, so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. All this died and in a sense also affected video development, some features that video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules.
As for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables.