Hardware acceleration on sound cards?

[Beerslayer]

First of all, I hope this is the right forum... I didn't see a Sound forum.

After reading that some people were getting several more fps in games using a sound card with hardware acceleration, I started wondering if it might be worthwhile to spend some extra money to get one. What I discovered after a couple of hours of searching is that the SB Audigy chip seems to be the only one left with hardware acceleration, and not even all of the SB cards with an Audigy chip have it. Then I read somewhere that Vista doesn't even support audio hardware acceleration.

I don't plan to get Vista anytime soon, so that isn't a major consideration (if it's even true). But I'm hoping that someone can enlighten regarding the actual benefits in terms of fps in games, and whether there are any other chips that support it.

 

[DaveSimmons]

With dual-core CPUs the 2-3 fps speedups sound cards offered a few years ago have vanished. In almost all games the second core is not fully used by the game so it has plenty of spare cycles to run a "dumb" sound card.

 

[Ghouler]

(1) Hardware acceleration gives you 2 benefits:
- speed
- accuracy
Up to 32 voices with limited effects hardware acceleration would not give you much edge over software processing. However if you are more demanding and want to run games at high sound settings hardware acceleration still yields benefits. First of all a few FPS more is always good to have, secondly software processing cannot properly render e.g. EAX 4 with its 128 concurrent voices each with up to 4 effects... You might think it is a lot, but think of where you are now, how many single sounds ("voices") you can hear (Perhaps your hifi, radio in the kitchen, air-conditioning, people in adjacent room, etc. Each sound comes with a reverberation off e.g. floor and ceiling ("effect 1"), some come thru obstacles (occlusion - "effect2"), if you happen to have a window open and hear traffic, each single card is a single source - they all move, with different speeds which alters observed frequency of sound they produce (VRRRROOOOOOM.... - this is effect 3 and so on. Now think of GTA or Quake and their fine and thick sound structures. Software processing can't put this experience across, it is not real.

(2) Audio hardware acceleration or processing can be done by X-Fi chip not only Audigy. Cards with X-Fi chip tend to be overall better then Audigy also for driver and software. They support eax 5 as well unlike any other sound card. Asus have claimed some degree of compatibility with hardware EAX recently too, but from the first reviews I read it seems their EAX implantation is a scaled-down EAX version based on reverse-engineering rather than a proper license. In some games sounds are missing or reversed front to rear. Maybe they improve this in future but for now they seem to be rather miss than hit.

(3) As for hardware acceleration in Vista it is present with OpenAL games. It is not there with Direct X games as Vista processes DirectX in software now. There are however third-party workarounds such as ALchemy that translate DirectX into OpenAL on the fly and thus enable hardware accelerated audio. Overall hardware audio acceleration is far from dead in Vista.

 

[0roo0roo]

you might not get vista, but its going to take over eventually, and it will move developers away from hardware accel sound. which is good since it means that everyone gets to benefit, not just those who are paying into the creative sound monopoly or whatever. and since the developers also know everyone benefits, they can devote their resources to sound without waste. soon quad core will be standard. after that who knows. vista moving away from proprietary stuff like creative eax is a good thing for all.

plus, creative is a shady ass company and i'd rather not give them a dime if possible. you gain much more fps with video cards and cpu than with any sound card upgrade, its just not worth considering these days.

it really doesnt matter. a good game is a good game, you think halflife 2 is horrible sounding because it doesn't support eax?
no, it sounds fine! and the software solutions will only get better.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
plus, creative is a shady ass company...

You mean they're in business to make profits? :shocked:

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
you might not get vista, but its going to take over eventually, and it will move developers away from hardware accel sound. which is good since it means that everyone gets to benefit, not just those who are paying into the creative sound monopoly or whatever. and since the developers also know everyone benefits, they can devote their resources to sound without waste. soon quad core will be standard. after that who knows. vista moving away from proprietary stuff like creative eax is a good thing for all.

Respectfully, I disagree. Current software audio implementations blow chunks because developers have no way of making audio effects scale. It needs to be able to run on the fraction of the CPU power of a low-end chip like a Celeron, which means we're getting something akin to what the SB Live was doing 10 years ago. Simple occlusions when they work right, filter based reverb instead of reflections, and absolutely no HRTF processing since it's CPU intensive. And since you can't sell audio like you can graphics, no one has an incentive to improve on things.

The setback was bad enough when we lost Aureal, if we lose Creative we may very well be stuck in 1998 for the rest of time.:|

 

[0roo0roo]

eh i dunno about that, i'm sure there will be software solutions from companies that will serve the game companies just as physics engines were sold to game companies before.

 

[nerp]

If you don't give a hoot about 3d sound and EAX style stuff, there's a lot of options for high quality soundcards with low signal to noise ratios and excellent audio reproduction aside from creative. Discerning ears and musicians have been buying non-creative soundcards for years and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

 

[Modelworks]

Sound cards that use things like EAX are not the target of developers anymore.
The new way to do sound in games is all software.
The reason for this is the way sound is being implemented in new gaming engines.
With EAX you used creatives libraries to tell it what you wanted the sound to do and the library did it.
The data was sent to the card in a raw form and EAX on the card added the filtering and mixed the sounds.
Now developers are mixing the sounds, with all the effects, adding filters, and modifying the sounds and the game engine is producing a pcm stream that is the sound the user hears.
Its no longer being filtered or calculated on the sound card.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
plus, creative is a shady ass company...

You mean they're in business to make profits? :shocked:

Creative: Fixing Our Crippled Sound Card Drivers Is ?Stealing our Goods?
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=16969
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/...3/creative-fixing.html

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: BeerslayerAfter reading that some people were getting several more fps in games using a sound card with hardware acceleration, I started wondering if it might be worthwhile to spend some extra money to get one.

Ask yourself, based on your needs: "does it make monetary sense to spend more than $0 on a 0fps performance increase"?

 

[warzer]

anyone know where i can find a good review comparing current sound cards for vista? i had a turtlebeach ddl that no longer works in vista. I am now using 64bit vista so i need a new soundcard that works with it besides my onboard audio.

i have the 790i evga, the onboard is pretty descent, but on the spdif port it does not do ddl or dts live. i use a surround sound reciever and optical cable to produce sound for my pc. 5.1 output in games and movies and such.

so those are my requirements what do you guys suggest?

i found 2 possible cards but not sure. the auzentech prelude or the asus xonar

 

[KurskKnyaz]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
With dual-core CPUs the 2-3 fps speedups sound cards offered a few years ago have vanished. In almost all games the second core is not fully used by the game so it has plenty of spare cycles to run a "dumb" sound card.

I have a P4 3.0GHz with HT, 2GB of RAM, Audigy 2 and a Radeon 9800 XT w/ 256MB. I was recently playing Halo (the first one, I know I'm behind) and I noticed that with hardware acceleration it ran smoother. The average framerate was probably not much different but it was less gittery. I had the same effect in Painkiller. I now have Vista and hardware acceleration is gone.

Originally posted by: nerp
With dual-core CPUs the 2-3 fps speedups sound cards offered a few years ago have vanished. In almost all games the second core is not fully used by the game so it has plenty of spare cycles to run a "dumb" sound card.

I run two sound cards in my system: the Creative Audigy 2 and M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496. I listen to music on the M-Audio and switch to the creative when I play games. I use Swan M200 speakers (which I'm selling BTW so PM me if interested) and Shure e2c headphones. The output from the Audigy goes to the input of the M-Audio so that I don't have to constantly switch cables around. One day I'm listening to my music and I realize that something about it sucks. Oops! turned out I forgot to switch audio devices in the control panel. The bottom line is: when initially comparing the two sound cards it is hard to notice any difference in sound quality, but when going from a high-end card to a gaming toy you realize that you just loss quality that you weren't aware you had.

Anyway, no hardware acceleration mean that my Audigy 2 Professional has to go ( PM if you're interested, BTW MODS, if you have a problem with me marketing my hardware here please erase the marketing parts and not the entire post). M-Audio should be an example for how to write sound card drivers for the industry. I have put up with Creative bloatware just so my games can run smooth. I'm sticking with Vista because it actually improved my performance over XP (something to do with better MS USB drivers).

 

[Blain]

Anyone know what sound cards play well with Premiere Pro?
I'm talking about quality and compatibility.

X-Fi... E-MU... M-Audio... ???


BTW, "Gaming" audio is not a priority at all.

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

i agree with what was said earlier about the benefits of dedicated sound: performance and quality
the last thing you need in a fps is to be bogged down. The effect is cumulative. Imagine a huge firefight- more physics, so the cpu is crunching away, more "stuff" going on visually- gpu is going at it, and all the shots, footspets, etc is killing the onboard. The whole time, system memory is getting thrown around like a cheap doll at a yardsale.

I have an x-fi xtreme music. I notice an appreciable difference in accuracy when playing fps games- especially when using headphones. Thye keep signal integrity together better than onboard, and "fix" thing the sound up better without muffling or muddying highs and lows as much. If you have good speakers or headphones- get the dedicated sound. You may even learn from my mistake- don't get an x-fi card that doesn't us its own onboard ram. the xtreme music def doesn't, and I don't think the xtreme gamer does either.

If you don't like the look of creative hardware support, or the lack of opengl/eax computability with vista, try asus- which breaks free of x-fi. The performance increase won't be as high (but still higher than onboard), but the quality should rival very closely.

If you like x-fi, but not creative, check out this: http://www.auzentech.com/site/products/feature.php
they have x-fi, and non x-fi solutions, and I feel a mark of quality is when they will sell you higher quality IC components to upgrade the board- do that on a creative board and kiss the warranty goodbye.

 

[0roo0roo]

well, lets just say that if your sound card makes the difference between smooth and not smooth, your system was seriously borderline to begin with or misconfigured. the percentage performance increase is insignificant and grows less significant by the day as cores get faster and more numerous.

 

[KurskKnyaz]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
well, lets just say that if your sound card makes the difference between smooth and not smooth, your system was seriously borderline to begin with or misconfigured. the percentage performance increase is insignificant and grows less significant by the day as cores get faster and more numerous.

I have a p4 3ghz HT, 2GM RAM, and a 256MB radeon 9800 xt. that is more than enough to run Halo and it is less jittery with an Audigy. In theory what you said is correct but I can't explain why games run smoother with the Audigy, I'm not talking about average frame rate what i'm saying is the game stutters without the Audigy. Maybe it has something to do with sound buffers.

 

[Oyeve]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
Sound cards that use things like EAX are not the target of developers anymore.
The new way to do sound in games is all software.
The reason for this is the way sound is being implemented in new gaming engines.
With EAX you used creatives libraries to tell it what you wanted the sound to do and the library did it.
The data was sent to the card in a raw form and EAX on the card added the filtering and mixed the sounds.
Now developers are mixing the sounds, with all the effects, adding filters, and modifying the sounds and the game engine is producing a pcm stream that is the sound the user hears.
Its no longer being filtered or calculated on the sound card.

Yep, Doom 3 I believe had all of its audio built into the game, so no matter what sound card you had it all sounded the same across the the board.