ASIO2WASAPI FREE by falcosoft

[pwal³]

10 hours ago, Grem said:

And they can't afford to hire good driver wizards to develop ASIO drivers for RealTek on-board sound? 

but why would they? surely that's up to the mobo makers that use their chipset

[Grem]

6 hours ago, pwal said:

that's up to the mobo makers

Great point!!

I don't know who's responsibility it is to develop them. 

Intel makes drivers for their chipsets. And so do other hardware/firmware manufactures. Yes the mobo makers tweak them, but if they had the driver to start with!!? IDK

Just doesn't seem that hard. 

BWTFDIK!!

[Jeslan]

Drivers are made by the manufacturers of the chipsets, not the motherboard maker. When you download the drivers for your motherboard you are downloading the drivers made by each device manufacturer, not the motherboard one. When you want to update the drivers of one of the devices from your motherboard to their latest version you have to go directly to the chipset manufacturer (in this specific case Realtek) and download the driver from their own website.

[ALC]

8 hours ago, Jeslan said:

When you want to update the drivers of one of the devices from your motherboard to their latest version you have to go directly to the chipset manufacturer (in this specific case Realtek) and download the driver from their own website.

This is true for Realtek except for their audio drivers which you have to get from the  motherboard maker.

[Jeslan]

10 hours ago, ALC said:

This is true for Realtek except for their audio drivers which you have to get from the  motherboard maker.

I see, thanks for the information. Certainly this was not the case until 5 years ago. Although to be honest, after checking it imho what most probably seems to be happening here is that Realtek simply just stopped releasing new drivers for their audio chipsets and simply started to rely on Windows 10 and 11 to deal with their driver installation. In fact when I went to check my motherboard support page (bought 6 months ago) there was no single driver download files apart from the intel chipset one, no audio drivers installer, not either for any other device. My guess is that any Realtek audio driver installation files that can still be found on motherboard websites must probably be just old Realtek installation files from 5 years ago.

Edit: Ok, my bad. I checked it again as it felt weird to be honest and now it seems the website is showing all drivers. Indeed it appears the Realtek audio drivers are there and are apparently updated to this year.

Edit2: Seeing the driver file name though (Realtek HD Universal Driver) it doesn't seem at all that the driver actually comes from or has anything to do with the mainboard manufacturer but actually Realtek themselves. It totally seems that Realtek just wanted to save costs by letting the delivery to the mainboard manufacturers. In fact the console app that usually came with the drivers is now an app hosted and downloaded from the microsoft store. I still remember Realtek servers were always extremely slow when you tried to download the drivers from their website and sometimes having to rely on third party websites like Guru3D because of this.

Edited December 31, 2023 by Jeslan