Sound Card = 40% more FPS!!!

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.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by www.sega.co.jp

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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. ._.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.