Does increased sound quality lower framerates

[tigersty1e]

Fear has an option to increase sounds to maximum.

Does this hurt the framerate?

 

[happy medium]

Yes it does and even more with onboard sound

 

[Cheex]

Originally posted by: happy medium
Yes it does and even more with onboard sound

How sure are you about that?

 

[aka1nas]

Sound processing will typically use up more CPU cycles, especially with an onboard setup. Whether this will be at all noticeable depends on how CPU-intensive the game is.

 

[BFG10K]

Yes, hence the need for Creative sound cards which typically have much lower CPU consumption than other vendors.

 

[Fistandantilis]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
Yes, hence the need for Creative sound cards which typically have much lower CPU consumption than other vendors.

So even though I have a soundcard, my processor is still dedicating cycles to sound? I thought that the soundcard would take care of that.

 

[BFG10K]

So even though I have a soundcard, my processor is still dedicating cycles to sound?

Yes, your processor still has to generate the raw audio streams. The sound card applies the mixing and effects and if it can do it in hardware that's were you'll get the gain.

 

[Gstanfor]

I think that offloading audio to a spare cpu will become a very obvious thing to do in future and I'm quite suprised that current audio drivers don't do it if they detect a dual-core or better cpu.

 

[Fistandantilis]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

So even though I have a soundcard, my processor is still dedicating cycles to sound?

Yes, your processor still has to generate the raw audio streams. The sound card applies the mixing and effects and if it can do it in hardware that's were you'll get the gain.

Ahh I see, thanks.

 

[Captante]

Originally posted by: happy medium
Yes it does and even more with onboard sound

I'm 100% sure he's correct because I tested it out with FEAR among others on my Asus Crosshair first with the onboard sound & then with my current X-Fi ... however I have to say that the difference was much more pronounced with the onboard solution which at points dropped frame-rates 25-30% compared to the X-Fi which caused much smaller drops that were measurable in benchmark testing but not noticable to the naked eye.