Impact of soundcard on gaming?

[CrimsonLiar]

Alas the Audigy LS is more a derivative of the SoundBlaster Live series than
the Audigy series, and its performance and quality show this (and the live
was not Creatives best in my oppinion). A real Soundblester Audigy/2/2ZS
would perform much better. Regards the ALC850 its a tremendous improvement
on the ALC650, though that wouldnt really be too difficult, even then its
going to be little better than your SBLive(that I hate). In terms of CPU
usage many reviews currently put the Audigy Cards at the top of the pile
(least CPU cycles required) with the Nvdia Soundstorm mobos coming a close
second (the same order as they tend to rate for overall game sound quality).

FarCry is a real oddity. Its EAX implementation is.... lets say incomplete
and there are as you rightly say some issues. Bizzarly those issus appear
less noticable towards the end of the game.

CrimsonLiar

 

[.>]

Read this thread with great interest and also Toms Hardware's
Sound and gaming benchmarks and decided to give it a try -
I have a P4P800-E-Deluxe with Realtek ALC850 and tho i wondered
if this chipset is better (performance wise) than the 650, I did
get slightly better framerates after installing the AudigyLS that
i've had sitting there since buying this system. Another 10fps in
quake3 - Alas Farcry started to have issues with EAX enabled -
a screeching sound, then nothing, while playing - turning on
compatible mode delayed the sounds - Painkiller and UT04
paused while starting levels much more than they did before
as well - OUT the audigy came !

I recently set up a machine with the realtek 650, I played unreal
tourny and the sound was a lot worse than the sblive oem on my other
machine. Lots of break up and noise. analog headphone out. Could be
just start up config problems of some kind. Can't say I noticed any
slow down though, going from 700mhz voodoo3 to 2.8Ghz 9800Pro

PS I found running just the minimum sblive windows drivers has given
good stability. Never loaded the bloatware. all I use is headphones
for games, so I don't need all the other stuff. Played around with
four channel once, but my speakers were too small to make it
interesting.

 

[Noozer]

This might be slight ot.
Does having a cheap sound card have any impact on fps in a game?
I mean, I'm using Soundblaster Live digital OEM. Which often give me crashes
and instability issues.
So i'm wondering if I buy a new soundcard, would that improve my game
speeds? Which soundcard is 'fastest', as in using least cpu and system
resources?

My current system is very modest.. Duron1600 @ 1800, 512mb pc133 ram, Kt7A,
Radeon9600se, winxp, 160Gb 7200rpm. I play mostly older rpg's on this
system. Morrowind, deus-ex, simcity, sacred and so on..

ANYTHING Creative makes is a piece o' crap... They can't even make their
cards PCI spec compliant! The software is even worse and the support is even
worse than that!

 

[We Live for the One we Die for the One]

Loozer what Sound card do you have then ??

ANYTHING Creative makes is a piece o' crap... They can't even make their
cards PCI spec compliant! The software is even worse and the support is even
worse than that!

 

[Darthy]

Onboard sound cards utilize your cpu to function. PCI sound cards , for
the most part, dont. They have their own sound processors on the card
and dont adversely effect your cpu.

er... wrong. You're out of date. That was so in the old days, when
onboard audio would ZONK the hell out of a system. As stated by
myself and others... onboard audio like the nForce is BETTER than the
Audigy and especially the Live. When I went to the Nforce board, I
tossed out my SB Live card (2-3 years old).

When you have a choice, go for a pci sound card like the creative sound
blaster audigy2 zs.

An nForce board cost less and does the same... if your doing MUSIC
work and such, then the AUDIGY is worth having... but not by much.

This is especially noticeable with a low end cpu like the duron.

??? A 1.4Ghz Duron is faster than a 2.8Ghz Celeron... so your point
is??? THink P-1 and P2 systems.... thats when it hurt the most.


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