KingNoneThat's because they just think of soundcards as DACs/Amps. Creative is the only soundcard that still does a good chunk of processing in hardware. The rest, even on board, do it via emulation (software) thus CPU. There's so much about sound cards that people forgot about because they don't remember what previous cards were all about; sound hardware acceleration. Sound cards were like ray tracing but with sound. They're unnecessary if you just want the most basic experience or are cheap / budgeted.