Whats the Deal with Realtek

Audio Hardware & Software Sound Cards & DACs & Other Hardware
1

Every single motherboard out there seems to come with realtek, and every single one has a different driver. Every laptop seems to have realtek, and again, different drivers. Each of these driver and software bundles seem to have different features.

One thing that seems overly important in today's video conferencing and, voice chat, and what have you is echo and noise suppression. The driver that came with my motherboard didn't support either of these. But I went out and hunted for a different one, which seemed to work perfectly and gave me both.

So what the heck is the deal? Why are there so many different drivers with such an array of features when the hardware is almost identical?

In a side note, what would be the best setup to reduce these issues? 

Right now i'm in a half kludged setup where i don't have room for my speakers so I'm using my monitor and its display port to pipe the audio out. It sounds mono and uses a different set of hardware so again everyone is hearing my audio over my mic. :p 

2

Different MOBO - different driver. The audio hardware may be very similar/ identical in some cases, but the drivers in question merely allow this hardware to effectivly talk to their respective MOBO

3

realtek makes a bunch of different chips alc892, 898, 1150 just to name a few.

it all depends on what chip the motherboard manufacturer put on.

4

Was actually referring to motherboards with the same chipset. 

Ones that will happily use the standard realtek drivers. But for some reason features are disabled in the drivers that come with them. Features that are built in, and you have to go hunt up a different driver to make them work.

5