Yeah, that's part of the "good enough" onboard audio.
But I doubt that gaming was the key driver at that point, it surely was the demand for work PCs to play the new .wav soundeffects of Win95, which led to mediocre onboard audio with Software MIDI-synths.
I vividly remember VIA onboard Audio everywhere, with gamers still putting Soundblasters in their PCs (fighting the BIOS to free up the IRQ and DMA ports) for the better quality and games still being developed for "Soundblaster 16".
But I doubt that gaming was the key driver at that point, it surely was the demand for work PCs to play the new .wav soundeffects of Win95, which led to mediocre onboard audio with Software MIDI-synths. I vividly remember VIA onboard Audio everywhere, with gamers still putting Soundblasters in their PCs (fighting the BIOS to free up the IRQ and DMA ports) for the better quality and games still being developed for "Soundblaster 16".
Good times :)