Performance of sound card vs. onboard

[Crisis101]

I opened up the Unreal II demo today, and 34 FPS just didn't seem all that good on a Radeon 9700. I turned off EAX, and the framerate jumped to 50. I'm using the onboard audio on my A7N8X. Would an Audigy 2 sound card pull all that stress off the processor and onto the sound card, letting me play games in all their aural perfection with little or no performance drop? Seeing how turning off EAX upped my U2 performance by roughly 66%, it sure would be nice.

 

[Brian48]

No. You'd still see a pretty severe hit. Maybe not as much, but it's still pretty severe. On the flipside, both UT2003 and Unreal2 does sound noticably better with the Audigy2 than with the on-board of my old A7N8X.

 

[DurocShark]

That's something I'd like to see... Anybody done a thorough comparison of the various sound cards/onboards? With the new DD 5.1 capable onboards, it's tempting to quit using cards altogether.

I'm using a Fortissimo 7.1 at the moment. But I'd love to see CPU load comparing to the NForce onboards and Audigy's.

 

[Ilmater]

There's something like that over at Tom's, but I'd rather see Anand tackle this one. The other problem is, it doesn't specify which nVidia motherboard it uses, it just says that it's an MCP-T equipped board.

 

[GTaudiophile]

SB Audigy/Live! series > all on-board audio except nVidia MCP-T
nVidia MCP-T > Live! series
SB Audigy series ~~ nVidia MCP-T

This nForce audio review from 3DSoundSurge may be helpful.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Ilmater
There's something like that over at Tom's, but I'd rather see Anand tackle this one. The other problem is, it doesn't specify which nVidia motherboard it uses, it just says that it's an MCP-T equipped board.

I still think there's something up with that review - as far as I know, the Realtek ALC650 is just a codec, not an actual sound processor. I've brought this up in other threads, but I never get any feedback.
They diss the ALC650, but they like the nForce's MCP-T. Funny thing, the 8RDA+ uses both - the MCP-T makes the sound signals, and the ALC650 converts the signals to something that speakers can use.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
SB Audigy/Live! series > all on-board audio except nVidia MCP-T
nVidia MCP-T > Live! series
SB Audigy series ~~ nVidia MCP-T

This nForce audio review from 3DSoundSurge may be helpful.

except that the live has really poor sound quality, maybe even worse than the average crap you get from a motherboard codec. the nforce review at 3dss uses a codec that isn't the same as you find on most boards.

 

[Harabecw]

disable sound and listen to the radio. its what I do about 80% of the time hehe.

correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the realtek a chip, and AC'97 the codec?

 

[Kingofcomputer]

AL650 is an AC97 compliant codec chip.

 

[Crisis101]

That's really interesting. It seems that the Audigy actually gives worse performance than the onboard NForce2 APU. Well, I guess I'll save $100 thanks to you guys! I can now go spend that money I saved not buying an Audigy on a new processor--that should improve performance. They weren't kidding when they said that the R9700 is limited by all but the fastest processors.

 

[corkyg]

As far as I'm concerned, the real key to top quality sound is a good external stereo amp and speakers with a sub-woofer. I put that on an on-board port and it rivals my Bose Lifestyle system in the front room. I don't go in for gimmicky 3-D things - just really good music repro.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: corky-g
As far as I'm concerned, the real key to top quality sound is a good external stereo amp and speakers with a sub-woofer. I put that on an on-board port and it rivals my Bose Lifestyle system in the front room. I don't go in for gimmicky 3-D things - just really good music repro.

*shakes head*

 

[holdencommodore]

nForce is the best "onboard" solution yet, the CPU usage is relativly low.... the new nForce drivers have some performance improvements with regards to EAX. Creative cards will always have lower usage when it comes to EAX as it's done in hardware. All other soundcards that use Sensaura EnvironmentFX or QSound Labs QEM will have heavier usage as EAX is done in software with partial HW acceleration. nVidia's EAX implimentation is their own, and compares quite favourably with the Audigy.

Cheers

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: corky-g
As far as I'm concerned, the real key to top quality sound is a good external stereo amp and speakers with a sub-woofer. I put that on an on-board port and it rivals my Bose Lifestyle system in the front room. I don't go in for gimmicky 3-D things - just really good music repro.

I disagree, a good system will sound like crap if you put it on a crappy onboard AC-97.
I have a Marantz SR6200 with a pair of Jamo speakers hooked up to my comp, and with the Santa Cruz is beats out any set of computer speakers.
But I've also had it on a built in AC97, sure it was way louder than a bunch of sattelites+sub, but it still didn't sound very good.

You need both a good soundcard and a good stereo setup.

 

[Goi]

Recent integrated audio solutions have been pretty good, including the Analog Devices AD1985, Realtek ALC650 and the CMI8738, basically the 3 main players in the integrated market. They offer basic, decent sound, and the later versions have fancier features like multi-channel support. nvidia's soundstorm takes it a couple steps further, offering better sound quality and performance across the board. I've seen a review where the soundstorm performed better/faster than an Audigy/Audigy2.

Sound quality wise though, standalone soundcards still have an edge, unless you're talking about Bargain bin soundcards like the Hercules Muse series, which uses the CMI8738 anyway.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: corky-g
As far as I'm concerned, the real key to top quality sound is a good external stereo amp and speakers with a sub-woofer. I put that on an on-board port and it rivals my Bose Lifestyle system in the front room. I don't go in for gimmicky 3-D things - just really good music repro.

I disagree, a good system will sound like crap if you put it on a crappy onboard AC-97.
I have a Marantz SR6200 with a pair of Jamo speakers hooked up to my comp, and with the Santa Cruz is beats out any set of computer speakers.
But I've also had it on a built in AC97, sure it was way louder than a bunch of sattelites+sub, but it still didn't sound very good.

You need both a good soundcard and a good stereo setup.

Garbage in, Garbage out - applies to speakers too. It's just that good speakers will reproduce the crappy sound with great accuracy.