EAX was very powerful in its heyday, but it has died because of a thousand cuts.

First we had to have the audio processor. Good EAX was available on top of the line cards, and they were not always cheap. Lower end chips got less features.

Then we had to have the speaker setup to have the greatest sound, or needed to get a real 5.1 headphones, which were bulky and never provided the same fidelity.

Then Microsoft changed the Windows driver model, cutting the driver's direct access to the card. All of the timing sensitive effects were gone in an instant. I remember installing the new drivers and getting literally nothing. Sound Blaster was the only card with an hardware mixer, and Microsoft didn't feel like enabling them. Mixing at the DirectX layer killed the cards.

Soundblaster's very closed stance didn't help them either. None of the cards after Audigy2 worked with Linux when I had my desktop system.

After my Audigy2ZS, I moved to Asus Xonar D2X. Its positional audio capabilities were nice, but I mostly bought it for its Linux support and sound quality, and that was top notch in that regards.

Then sound cards became commodity. Everybody stopped making good cards. Musicians moved to audio interfaces, audiophiles moved to DACs.

Just looked to the SoundBlaster website. Internal cards are very limited. One DAC, one DTS enabled 7.1 sound card for PC cinema systems, three game oriented lower end cards, nothing else.

Eeeeeh idk about the Sound Blaster comparison. Creative earned their place in the early-mid 90s solely because they were the one company making a sound card with drivers that actually worked properly.

It wasn't really the cool reverb effects or wave tables, though those were a nice bonus. It was just "I can tell my computer to make sound and it actually makes sound without days of troubleshooting."

Granted, similar things could be said about 3dfx. It's was a 3D card with drivers that actually worked.

And then there's the obvious "sound blasters and voodoos go in my computer, jalapeno goes in someone else's computer" thing.

On board got "good enough" and the separate cards died away.

In fairness on board (depending on the board but on the whole) is pretty good.

There is drastically more power and profit in the software ultimately.

Apple is in the software first, the hardware second. Everyone at Apple has been trained to understand this for decades, and Jobs pointed it out endlessly. Apple's real moat is software (services, iOS, experience, MacOS).

Windows, Office, Azure, et al. Microsoft accumulated approximately one zillion dollars in profit on the back of software. It's a vastly superior business to anything hardware has traditionally seen. Nvidia is the first true juggernaut hardware profit machine, and the AI boom in extended hardware (RAM, storage) will prove temporary (even if there is a feast during that time). Microsoft's advantage and moat was Windows-Office for decades. It was a far better business than Intel's chip biz.

Google is a software company first. Every aspect of what made them and maintains them is software first, hardware second. They're a $400 billion software company. Their ad machine is software. Search is software.

Facebook is software. Instagram is software. WhatsApp is software. A $200 billion software company. They're not selling hardware, they're selling ads via software, they're monetizing users that use their software.

AWS is at least half software as an entity in terms of complexity, competitive advantage, et al. That's a two trillion dollar business.

LLMs can run successfully with various hardware approaches. The software is the value at the end of this, regardless of the hardware under it. The sole exception so far that may be sustainable is Nvidia, and we'll see if the bottom falls out from under that margin monster (China, specialized AI chips, whatever it happens to be that cuts under them massively).

Hardware always gets its margin squeezed eventually because it's a manufactured good (with inventory, fabs, etc). Software is hyper margin by default, you have to layer a lot of garbage on top of it to kill the margin. Nvidia is 33 years old, they have had a rich business for three years, that's it.

The AI boom is the sole reason anything in hardware has looked great in the past 20 years. Check the margins & op income for the top 20 hardware companies, from TI to AMD to Intel to Nvidia to Micron to Sandisk to Samsung to TSMC to ASML, prior to the AI boom of the past couple years. It won't last indefinitely. And after the return to a more normal environment happens, the hyper margins in software will persist.

I bet cost is of no issue with the capx where it is at. It is almost certainly organizational. Meta throws money at every problem and it never seems to workout for them.