SoundStorm is a brand by Nvidia referring to a SIP block integrating 5.1 surround sound technology found on the die of their nForce and nForce2 chipsets for x86 CPUs.

SoundStorm was the only available solution capable of outputting Dolby Digital Live, coveted in home theater PCs.

A fully programmable, Motorola 56300-based digital signal processor (DSP) is provided for effects processing but with very limited support under DirectX on the PC.

Since the SoundStorm solution was a general-purpose DSP where code was uploaded to the card by the device drivers at boot time, this made it easy to add new functionality.

[citation needed] Other manufacturers have since produced standalone sound cards based on C-Media chips such as the CMI8788[3] which also provide Dolby Digital and DTS encoding features.

[5] A software alternative is redocneXk,[6] which provides real-time AC3 encoding comparable to SoundStorm or Creative's Audigy2 and later sound cards.