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Creative X-Fi platinum supposed to give you 40% FPS increase?!?

E

EuR Fr3nCh T3rRoR

Member
I have one rig with a X-Fi Platinum edition soundcard and my other rig has a Audigy 2ZS Platinum Soundcard. I use Xfire a lot and I see these advertisements by Creative stating that the X-Fi soundcard gains you 40% faster frame rates in games. Now is this a load of crock or is my soundcard not benefiting my first SLI rig?

Exact words from Creative... "Get up to 40% faster frame rates in games"

What are your opinions on this?
 
Generally speaking, if you are old enough to think for yourself, and aren't the defensive, remorseful buyer, most will come to the conclusion that it truly is not completely accurate (actually not remotely accurate).

However you will meet alot of people who base their arguments on press releases and tell you that you are a hater otherwise, if say, you bring in real statistics, to deflect attention from themselves and to help draw in a mob of similar-minded remorseful buyers (these individuals tend to be very young, but age is not always a common dynamic).
 
From the reviews I read of X-Fi, the reason to buy the cards would be for sound quality over high end PC speakers (such as Klipsch) or studio quality headphones. The PC game performance increase might be there (although more like 4% if anything), and they can talk it up all they want to try and sell more cards to suckers, however the real selling point of the card is sound quality.

Maybe you could get 40% if you took the most sound processing intensive video game, gave it a slow Celeron, and then threw in an X-Fi - however its just silly to claim 40% and I question whether you saw what you saw. In the past I've looked at sound cards and reviews of them and have never seen any senario where one gives you any tangible performance benefit over the other, the only justification for buying a sound card for improved performance would be out of fear that all the little things would add up - or as an excuse to have the best of the best.
 
What are your opinions on this?
Click to expand...
Compare the performance of onboard audio to an X-Fi with 64 voices and full EAX effects and you might well see 40% better performance in certain situations.
 
Originally posted by: BFG10K
What are your opinions on this?
Click to expand...
Compare the performance of onboard audio to an X-Fi with 64 voices and full EAX effects and you might well see 40% better performance in certain situations.
Click to expand...

IF You have a horrendous and very old onboard audio and you are playing a game at 320x240.
 
as soon as you see a vendor say the words "Up to..." you need to realize that the highest number they could get was in a contrived laboratory setting, with software they created/modified to create exactly that number.

Up to means 0 to whatever top number they say, with 0 being much closer to what you'll experience in real world use.
 
I'm glad I got your opinions, because between my two rigs, I don't see 40%. 2% increase if that...lol

I love how Creative states certain things, eastvillager is right, upto can mean if 1% of that 40% they promise...lol
 
I don't have an SLI rig, and I did see a frame rate jump after installing the X-Fi... but I don't think it was anywhere near 40%. I would say it was closer to 10%, but I didn't measure it 😛
 
How about you turn the sound off completely and see how fast wishing in one hand and shittin in the other gives you results.
 
Its a crock of crap. I have an X-FI but I bought it for sound quality and the live drive.. i hightly doubt the performance increases are more than 5% in the most optimised games.
 
if you play a game using 128voices and it makes use of the X-ram it can be 40% faster. So its not a lie, its missing important information.
 
It might SOUND 40% better, but performance? Saw no increase going from a Audigy to an X-fi, only sounded slightly better.
 
I still fail how to see
A. Sound disabled in game, no cycles used for sound
could possibly be faster than
B. Game w/ X-fi acceleration
 
You're not getting a 40% increase except in very rare situations, the quote is "up to 40%", not, "40% gain in all games vs anything on the market." Also, the increase is in comparison to any non-Creative sound card. Creative's Audigy has always had some acceleration capabilities. It's the competition that lacks any such feature. There are plenty of reviews around the web that show the X-Fi performing around 8-18% better than onboard, M-Audio and Terratec competing cards in real games at realistic settings (not 320x640). That's not 40%, but 10-15% is nothing to scoff at, and it should also be noted that X-Fi is performing better while producing much better audio, since it is running a more advanced version of EAX. If competing cards could run EAX HD, the difference might well be 40%. It's sort of like the equivalent of if NVidia could run games 10% faster than ATi, while NVidia was using all the bells and whistles of DirectX 9, while Ati was running DirectX 5. Not really a fair fight, but even with the handicap of more work, it still performs better.

I still fail how to see
A. Sound disabled in game, no cycles used for sound
could possibly be faster than
B. Game w/ X-fi acceleration
Click to expand...

Might want to go back and retake computing 101 if this one stumps you.
 
if you're using an Audigy LS and move to an X-fi with all the sound qualities turned up to "MAX" with hardware acc., you will notice a significant increase in FPS. Otherwise, don't count on it too much.
 
When they mean that they are probably are talking about a system that has a very very slow CPU that is using on-board sound while playing a very CPU heavy game. So now it has to pass the sound processing to the processor (making it even more boged down.) Add their sound card that unloads the sound proccessing from the proccessor. Making it 40% faster.


AKA: They are full of ******.
 
I haven't actually seen one of the 40% ads, but from Creative's X-Fi product page:

Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty - X-RAM for high performance gaming

"A completely re-engineered game audio processing engine utilizing Creative X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio processor allows Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty to deliver the fastest gaming performance ever seen, providing more than a 15% performance boost over motherboard audio solutions while simultaneously delivering full audio effects!"

Why Creative would say up to 40% in some places and 15% on the actual product pages is beyond me, but there are reviews online that confirm the 15% improvement claim, so they aren't exaggerating everywhere.

Edit: I found where they said that, and they actually tell you exactly where:

Sound Blaster X-Fi - Born For Gaming!

"In fact in our initial testing we have seen frame-rate increases from 15% (in Unreal Tournament 2004) up to 40% (in Battlefield 2), compared to motherboard audio solutions."

So there you have it, Creative is claiming a 40% increase when playing Battlefield 2, probably in the ultra mode. Since no other game actually uses that many voices, you're not going to see that level of improvement.
 
Good research done by Pariah on this, makes sense to me though. I am probably going to go out and buy another X-Fi platinum soundcard for my second rig, to replace that old Audigy 2ZS Platinum Edition.

I just think some quotes made by certain companies is pretty funny, and just wanted to hear every other blokes opinion on it.
 
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