Sound card and gaming performance

palladium

Senior member
Dec 24, 2007
539
2
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Hmm I came across an online catalogue from a local ( New Zealand) online store for Creative Xi-Fi Xtreme Music sound card. Here is part of it that I find misleading:

Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic delivers the fastest gaming performance ever!

A completely re-engineered game audio processing engine utilizing the Creative X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio processor allows Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic 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


Does it mean that if I play Crysis on a reasonably high end machine, would I get 15% more fps when I use the sound card cf when I use onboard audio, or...?

Any comments/clarification would be appreciated.
 

BoboKatt

Senior member
Nov 18, 2004
529
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I highly doubt 15 more FPS. All that these "gaming" sound cards really promise (if that) is to offload the majority of the audio work from your CPU onto their dedicated audio card, effectively freeing up more CPU cycles/processes to be used elsewhere.

I have read some articles on audio cards, and one of the major testing criteria (apart from sound quality of course) is just how much CPU resources they use when running a game benchmark. At the end of the day, if your onboard crap sound card say uses 12% CPU, while the dedicated sound card uses only 1% or 2%.... then from those stats it does indeed show off in the actual game FPS. However, again from what I read a while back it would be a minor increase, not a substantial one like 15 FPS. However if you current computer is struggling playing certain games and using onboard audio (and I have confirmed this in the past), switching to a dedicated audio card may result in less stuttering or audio issues if you experienced those problems in the past.

Still if you are looking to get the absolute last bit of frames out of a game, you could for sure get the best least CPU usage audio card to help out. Thing is that some of these cards may cost quite a bit of coin, where you could use the coin to get a better video card (after selling yours of course depending on what it is) and you would for sure see a tangible difference then in FPS over just getting a dedicated audio card.

I am by no means an expert in this? just my view or what I have read and experienced. Currently both my systems use the onboard audio and one is my HTPC (using optical out). I have never had any issues with those onboards but I am using a Q6600 G0 oc?ed to 3Ghz so not like I am stressing that CPU most of the times.
 

chizow

Diamond Member
Jun 26, 2001
9,537
2
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Difference between onboard and add-in CPU utilization is negligible nowadays, HOWEVER, there are some games that see a significant boost in performance if you completely disable sound.