ABSTRACT
As mentioned in many places throughout this book, audio gets only about 10% of a machine’s processing resources. PC, handheld or console, its always the same story. The audio programming challenge is to find a way to do more in the same amount of time. In the last chapter, we implemented a software wavetable synthesizer on the PC, and used the DirectSound API to do all the mixing. That API, while certainly adequate, is a general-purpose DA solution. It wasn’t designed specifically for doing wavetable synthesis, and therefore suffers from some unnecessary overhead when performing this task. If we can eliminate that overhead and do the mixing ourselves, we can make our 10% of the machine go further.
