Sound Card = 40% more FPS!!!
 

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So if I run at 50FPS now, this sound card will boost it to 70. Gimmie a break. I call bullshit.

Sound Blaster Live! 5.1

Got it like 2 years ago. $20. Works great and then some.

Actually, I have an X-Fi Platinum Card, and I have to say that it really has some impressive abilities.
I don't know about Battlefield 2, but it definitely could make great sound come from my mediocre speaker system.
The X-Fi cards are definitely powerful, and could easily handle the most complex of music production programs that I threw at it.

I think it has something to do with the audio processing and whether or not it's CPU-dependent or not. So, assuming that one has a card that makes the CPU do some of the work versus one that does it on the audio card, the latter would get more FPS. But 40% more? It may be a powerful sound card, but that's still a load of bull.

In other news, I got my cheapo Catalina 7.1 card today along with 12 feet of optical cable so now the sound runs through my surround system rather than my listen-listen-we're-dying PC speakers. This setup coupled with DualView, BTW thanks Lukage, makes for some tasty computing.

I think the keyword there is,

I have an Audigy 2 ZS and all it does basically, besides making my Creative I-Trigue 3300 speakers sound a lot better than before, is add a few extra sound features to the PC Games I play.

The X-Fi is a lot faster than integrated chips at processing EAX and other environmental audio stuff, so it's not much of a stretch to say that it could increase frame rates by 30% or more if you like that stuff. Of course, if you're using integrated sound, you probably don't have EAX enabled in games anyways.

The X-Fi does sound a lot better than the SB Live, though.

Relic, the X-Fi is no FASTER than Onboard sound. It may be able to decode EAC and other codecs, but that's not faster. The only "speed" benefit relative to onboard is that your CPU doesn't have to decode your sound. But that's never intensive enough to give you a 40% FPS boost. That's a load of crap.





....just like Creative's Sound Cards.

Oh come off it. These are easily repeatable benchmarks. You take a machine with integrated sound (and video) benchmark it against a machine with a super-awesome-extreme standalone soundcard (and video), and there you have it. Huge FPS increase.


...What?

actually, some onboard sound chips have awful cpu utilization, sometimes up to 30-ish percent of the cpu while doing enough directsound for 3d games. i think most are down to around 10 percent, but that's still pretty nasty while playing a game that'll want 100 percent.

but, the reality is, just about any sound card will take the load off the cpu, not just the x-fi.

And it matters even less for a multi-core processor due to it's strengths in multi-tasking. Honestly, if you're not a heavy gamer, just get yourself a cheaper soundcard which often times sound just as good as Creative's often overpriced gamer-targeted products.

Which is why, for $15-20, a Sound Blaster Live! can do the trick just fine. Now, if you're into audio editing and the works, by all means get these premiere cards, but I think for listening to music and gaming, the boost that this really provides isn't much.

Well if the game was somehow using software 5.1+ digital decoding for its sound (Doom 3 engine can do this for example) then I could easily see an increase of that much by moving that sound decoding to a hardware accelerator like the X-Fi. Unfortunately for Creative, most engines don't even offer software digital decoding.

Even if there was no sound in most games today, I highly doubt framerates would jump by 40%. With most sound formats not even using 5% CPU usage on a 700MHz CPU (mine), it's very slim that any sound format drain 40% of the fps on any game.

The X-Fi isn't meant to accelerate sound decoding. It's designed to accelerate EAX and DirectSound 3D effects...reverb, occlusion, HRTF speaker/headphone compensation, and other fun stuff. Onboard sound chips can't do effects, so they rely on the main processor to handle them instead. No matter what sound chip you use, audio decompression is going to be handled by the main processor.

That said, Creative is notorious for...uh, creative marketing, and the 40% figure is probably very optimistic, especially since most people who are gaming with onboard sound won't be using EAX effects. It's not as big of a stretch as you seem to think it is, though.

i've heard that the audigies are pretty bad for sound editing / music creation when compared to other companies' high-end stuff.

I like how you're an idiot.

It's been stated for years that onboard video is shit and we already know it.

Onboard video has no point ANYWHERE in this topic. This is comparing on-board audio performance to soundcard audio performance.

Therefore, your made-up benchmark scenario FAILS.

He's saying that Creative's claim is based on a comparison between an all onboard system and a 7900GTX + X-Fi system because there's no way a change in sound cards could increase performance that much.

I think Merv is pointing out the fact that a bar of soap is better then onboard sound and that pointing out the obvious is rather rediculous.

Actually the only flaw of onboard sound is CPU usage. But considering most PCs over 1GHz can more than handle any form of playback, the issue isn't so much game speed increase, but features.

The only flaw happens to be the harshest flaw. 5% of a 2Ghz processor is actually a huge waste of resources. Think about it in reverse. A 5% overclock can result in a 10-20FPS increase in performance depending on your stock clock rate. If you are hovering near 100% CPU utilization, that 5% could mean the difference between a playable and non-playable experience.

Yeah, well that's 5% usage on a 700MHz CPU, on a 2GHz or higher, it's probably lower than 1%. Remember though, also keep in CPU usage tests they do for soundcards do things that you'd probably never try on a PC (like playing back 32 wav files at the same time).

How about decoding a 5.1 digital signal? Using a software decoder like ffdshow (the audio channel obviously) takes 7% of my CPU time with a 3.2 Ghz P4 with HT.

Using a card is obviously going to show some improvements because it takes a small load off the cpu. It probably wont have as much an impact on more powerfull machines but on slower machines it could show a big improvement.

However, this is all kind of moot anyways because as time goes by onboard audio is becoming just as good as any soundcard. With dual or more cores in cpus the load from onboard audio or software becomes insignificant.

You no longer have to worry about that kind of thing because you finally have a cpu that can actually multitask and do all the work with ease.

Funny how this is my first post. Anyway...

If you guys read this article over here:

http://www.soundblaster.com/products...gamingXram.asp

You'll find out exactly why and how the X-Fi can boost your gaming FPS. Two models of the card, the Fatal1ty and the Elite Pro actually contain 64MB of onboard RAM (called XRAM). This XRAM is utilized by SPECIFIC games (right, this feature has to be specifically coded into the game, Battlefield 2 supports it, as does Quake 4, and probably a bunch of forthcoming games) to boost performance.

Does anyone posting in this thread actually have an X-Fi? :)

And for everyone who said that the X-Fi sounds better, all it does is applying some pretty DSP effect to the sounds. That and it also supports EAX better then anything else (too bad EAX blows).

For anything other then gaming, the Soundblasters are horrible. Get an Envy24 based card, those sound a lot better then any of Creatives cards.

Agreed. EMU1212m/EMU0404 (Depending on your preference - they each have a distinct sound signature) > Envy24 > Creative Anything

Yeah, I'm going to go with the fact that most of you don't own an X-Fi as well. I had an Envy24 (Revolution 7.1) and replaced it with an X-Fi and it easily sounds as good. Plus I get the added bonus of EAX and accelerated voices with the X-Fi. Plus the stereo upmixing higher quality in the X-Fi than pretty much anything you could find under $5,000.

Maybe some of you should read some of the X-Fi reviews. Most people agree they are a huge step up from the Audigy cards.

That "Huge Step Up" is a bunch of resampling 'crystallization' bullshit that I consider a negative rather than a positive. I'll stick to my original music, kthx.

Exactly, I'd rather have perfect sound reproduction than cpu usage speed up. Also I've decoded 5.1 and 6.1 audio, and got cpu usage low enough that I could decode DivX and XviD without a frame rate drop.

Crystallization is an option, and it isn't even a resampling method. It reshapes the sound output waveform without resampling. It's more like a hardware equalizer. I love how you play it off without even hearing it though as it does an really nice job in increasing the sound quality of pretty much every lossy format out there. But of course, you can turn it off, and with the X-Fi get an untouched audio stream since it doesn't internally resample anything. Not only that, but the physical layout of the X-Fi chip is a ring, so if you decide to turn any of the 'features' off, the sound data doesn't even have to pass though the given hardware.

But, anyway the major step up from the Audigy cards is the X-Fi does not internally resample to 48 kHz. It also offers a much higher quality DAC converter and a better signal-to-noise ratio than any non-professional sound card out there. But of course I'm sure you knew all of this. Actually, I guess you didn't as you won't be making such asinine comments if you did.

FIREFOX IS STILL BETTER

REFORMAT

USE LINUX!@!!!

Thanks for putting exactly what I was thinking in better words. :P

The X-Fi is not a bad-sounding card, period. They seem to be roughly equal to the lower-end Envy24 cards in terms of sound quality, but with much better gaming performance.

I actually had an AV710 at one time, but I went back to the Audigy 2 Value. The VIA drivers are a pain, UT2004 just doesn't get along well with non-Creative cards, and through my AKG K501 headphones, there just isn't that big of a difference in sound quality. ._.

You do realize that the E-MU 1212m/0404/1820/1820m/1616/1616m all use an EMU10k-based chip (you know, made by CREATIVE, haha), right?

I have to agree with you though, the E-MU 1010-based cards kick out some of the cleanest audio you'll find for under a few hundred bucks. Look up some reviews for the E-MU 1820M. You'll be blown away.

Ah, so it's worse than I thought.Actually, I have heard it, and I decidedly don't like it. I'm flat-out unimpressed and see no reason to change my gaming card from my Audigy 2 ZS or change my actual SOUND card from my Envy24.Only in the $300 version.

Really though what sound card produces substantially better quality than even a lowly Soundblaster 16? Out of every soundcard I've ever used, none. It's the quality of the speakers, not (unless your sound card really sucks) the capabilites of the card. In fact all my speakers and headphones couldn't even test the quality of the DAC between any modern soundcard, they're not sensitive (or expensive) enough for me to distinguish that.

It seems my sarcasm didn't go over particularly well on that one.

I was making a joke about how outlandish the performance claim was, and making a point that whatever testing method used (All we know is that it in some way involves an X-fi and Battlefield 2) has go to be very carefully chosen to pull off that kind of number.

The performance jump just sounds too similar to those OS comparisons where they run a machine with 256MB of RAM vs. 1024MB.

And for the record, no I don't have an X-fi, not that I have anything against them (Despite issues with Creative in the past).

Though it seems I'm an idiot none the less.