| Microsoft DirectX 8.1 (C++) |
Most audio cards sold today, if not all, are designed to connect to the PCI bus. With the movement to this bus comes a large increase in the available bandwidth between the system and the audio card. It is now practical to have the audio chip reach directly into system memory to retrieve audio data for hardware mixing. As a result, it is no longer worthwhile to have on-board memory for buffers.
On PCI cards, static buffers and streaming buffers are effectively the same. The DSBCAPS_STATIC flag does not affect the location of the buffer, because all buffers are located in system memory.
Note Most sound cards report in DSCAPS that they have static buffers, even though they have no on-card RAM. The streaming and static buffers reported by these cards are often the same buffers.