SBLive! degrades system performance?

[GL]

I've got a PIII 960 on an Asus CUV4X (VIA 694z - Via Apollo Pro 133a). I also have a SBLive! Value and an AIW Radeon, and am using Win2k Pro SP2 with the SBLive drivers from summer 2000. I was on rage3d.com's forums and somebody mentioned getting better framerates without the SBLive!. So I disabled my SBLive! and played F1 Racing Championship and it played dramatically better - the graphics were much more fluid. I don't have a framerate analysis tool but I'd guestimate that there was a 25% performance boost.

Now, my question is: Can I realize this same performance boost (or almost) by going with a busmastering sound card seeing that the SBLive! Value is not a busmaster device? Is the SBLive! even the culprit here?

EDIT: Hmm...seems like the SBLive! does do bus mastering. Anyways, my questions remain.

 

[splice]

Well, performance loss is going to happen no matter what sound you have in there, if it's being used. Obviously some cards are more efficent than others. Anyways, the SBLive! series are notorious for hogging the PCI bus when in use.

 

[Priit]

Seeing from many reviews, SBLive uses a considerable amout of CPU time when playing many sound streams at once (even thought they should be handled in hardware).

 

[GL]

What sort of trade-offs would I have by upgrading to a Hercules Fortissimo II? tomshardware.com did benchmarks and it seems to be the most efficient sound card.

 

[Taylorm]

i did some benchmarking results. i gained 60 fps in quake3 demo four by turning sound OFF versus sound on

but once your past 200fps its all good

 

[splice]

<< What sort of trade-offs would I have by upgrading to a Hercules Fortissimo II? tomshardware.com did benchmarks and it seems to be the most efficient sound card. >>



That is a great basic card, I'd say it's equal if not better than a SBLive!. I use it in my DVD box and it works very well. It has a nice breakout connector in the back too.

Some specs:

Cirrus Logic CS4624 DSP
Optical In/Out, MIDI, Line-In and the breakout cable (Front/Rear speakers, Heaphones, Mic)
Supports MS DirectSound 3D, EAX 1.0/2.0, A3D, I3DL2, MacroFX, MultiDrive, ZoomFX, EnvironmentFX.

 

[Slapstick]

Before you get a new sound card, (unless you just want one) try downloading a copy of DierctX Contol Panel and checking where the Debug level is set for direct sound., (place it in the System32 folder for W2k or the System folder for Win 9x) In DirectX 8, (don?t know about 8.1) there seems to be a problem and the debug level is set about half way up the slider, push it all the way down and see if that helps your frame rates, it did mine.

 

[thorin]

The nForce APU is going to be the most efficient solution going forward.

Look Here and note the CPU utilization differences between the SBLive! and the nForce APU.

At 32 voices in DirectSDound 3D Audio the APU uses ~3.2% CPU while the SBLive! is eating a whoping 34%.

"What sort of trade-offs would I have by upgrading to a Hercules Fortissimo II? tomshardware.com did benchmarks and it seems to be the most efficient sound card. "

Hmmm where's the linky, I want to compare this Herc thing to the nForce APU.

Thorin

 

[GL]

<< Before you get a new sound card, (unless you just want one) try downloading a copy of DierctX Contol Panel and checking where the Debug level is set for direct sound., (place it in the System32 folder for W2k or the System folder for Win 9x) In DirectX 8, (don?t know about 8.1) there seems to be a problem and the debug level is set about half way up the slider, push it all the way down and see if that helps your frame rates, it did mine. >>



Thanks but I knew about this and already had the slider all the way towards 'less'.

thorin

Tom's soundcard summaries

 

[CraigRT]

<< i did some benchmarking results. i gained 60 fps in quake3 demo four by turning sound OFF versus sound on >>



There is no way simply turning off sound should warrant that type of fps improvement.. something is fux0red in there somewheres...

 

[thorin]

GL
Thanks for the link. It appears that the nForce APU will completely kill everything else when it comes to CPU usage.

Thorin

 

[AA0]

nForce might have a low cpu %, but there are few reviews of it. I've heard the sound quality was poor compared to Live!, and Live! sucks for sound quality. Many motherboard companies are also avoiding using it, like Asus.... there must be a reason. It was a very buggy part of the chipset a while ago, maybe they never fixed it properly.

 

[boyRacer]

Wait... so what's happening is when people turn off sound... they get more framerates? but isn't that what was supposed to happen anyway?... i dunno... i always thought the Live took the least amount of CPU cycles than all of the other soundcards... what about the Audigy?

 

[thorin]

AA0
" Many motherboard companies are also avoiding using it, like Asus.... there must be a reason."

Actually that's incorrect:

From nvnews.net:


<< New Asus nForce - 11/12/2001 6:27 pm - By: JonathanM - Source: NVchips-fr

Asus has finally launched a board based on the nForce that will be utilizing the NVIDIA MCP instead of other third party audio and other features found on the MCP.

> Thanks to the NVIDIA MCP-D southbridge and an ASUS ACR audio module, users can experience incredible Dolby 5.1 audio and S/PDIF-in/out connectivity to highest-quality speaker systems. The A7N266-E with Dolby audio support offers an onboard theatre-quality sound experience, with superior performance to most external sound cards.

WOOHOO! No word on availibility though. Seems like a tweakers dream:

> Easy DIP Switch or Jumperfree overclocking from BIOS
> Flexible CPU Core Voltage Adjustments in 0.05V increments over defaults
> Accurate 1MHz adjustments of system-bus-frequency up to 200MHz
> Adjustable VIO memory voltage
> Adjustable FSB/PCI/MEM ratio
> Rock-solid stability

And the rest of the specs. Seems they still prefer Realtek's 10/100 LAN controller:

>Supports socket A AMD Duron, Athlon, and Athlon XP up to 1900+ and beyond NVIDIA nForce 420D:
> NVIDIA IGP-128 north bridge and NVIDIA MCP south bridge
> 200/266MHz front-side-bus
> Integrated NVIDIA GeForce2 graphics core
> Integrated Dolby Digital Audio
> ASUS ACR audio module with SPDIF-in/out interface
> 3 DIMM slots and up to 1.5GB of PC2100/1600 non ECC DDR memory support
> 128-bit TwinBank memory architecture for up to 4.2GB/s bandwidth
> Realtek RTL 8139 10/100 Mbps LAN controller
> 5 PCI slots, 2 USB ports, and 1 AGP Pro slot, 1 ACR slot >>


Thorin

 

[NeonFlak]

The Fortissimio II is the most efficient card out right now. It uses less cpu than the Audigy and the sound quality is supposed to be pretty good as well. Can't beat that for a card that you can get online for 33 bucks. Here is another link to a bigger sound card round up

 

[GL]

Thanks everyone for the input. I realize enabling sound should decrease performance but I honestly didn't expect such a dramatic drop that it seems to have. This isn't a decrease I noticed in benchmarking - it was with my own eyes, so it has to be quite dramatic. I always thought the EMU10K1 was supposed to be a powerhouse DSP and that it offloaded much of the work from the CPU, but perhaps not.

Hopefully the nForce mobos will be all they are made out to be. My current rig is nearing the end of the road in terms of being able to play videogames. So I suppose I'll just have to keep this in mind in determining my next rig which will hopefully be geared more towards gaming.

 

[Taylorm]

hey guy when i said 60fps difference that is with quake3 set to "fastest" 512x864. the cpu is used more on low resolutions