Sound card confusion...

[misterv]

For quite a number of years I've just kept putting in my first Sound Blaster 16 in PCs and playing games. I didn't think much of it as I only had two speakers. Well I've finally decided to build a new computer as too many games are running like crap on my old one (P4 1.5) and upon looking through mother board options I was suprised to see that most motherboards now come with AC'97 or some "multi-channel" soundcard onboard. I also then looked at what sound-blaster had produced and they are up to Audigy 4 EAX4.0. I then realized I have no idea what's going on with soundcards anymore and google searches didn't help much either.

Newegg had a chaintech soundcard that went up to 7.1 channels. Here's my concern. Is there a driver standard for sound (like openGL or direct3D is to graphics) that guarantees the use of all of those channels in things like software DVD-players, games, etc? Or if you want to play games with 3d sound to a 5.1 speaker system, you'd better get a card that supports EAX and specifically a Audigy? From glancing at the EAX API info it seems to be that EAX is extending microsoft's DirectSound3D API and focusing on reverberation more than it's telling what sound to go out of which speaker... what is controlling what sound is coming out of which speaker in a game?

For instance, what is the hardware/software requirement for playing say Call of Duty and having a guy shooting a gun behind and to the left of me coming out of the back left speaker?

I suppose I would need something that supported at least 5.1 channel sound and 5 speakers one of which was back and left. Do I need DirectSound3D support for this to happen? do I need AC97 support? Do I need EAX support?

Does the digital output for the soundcards to say a "Dolby Digital/DTS Home Theater receiver" encode the mulit-channel sound and let you play it to the receiver?

Sorry for all the questions, I just don't understand what happened to sound since the last I payed attention Sound Blaster AWE 32 was the it card to have...

Thanks!
Vik

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

For gaming I would definitely go with the Audigy 2 (the Audigy 4 is more for audophiles and the avante garde who want to overpay for a beefed up Audigy 2). It will give you EAX and keep the cpu free for other things when gaming. Some people don't like the drivers (i.e. bloatware) on the Audigy's but I have never had a problem myself.

Onboard sound was pretty good with the Soundstorm but it has died with the NF2.
AC97 support is pretty old and almost all modern onboard sound exceeds that spec at this point.
EAX support is not for dolby digital but is a proprietary audio system for gaming and 3d immersion created by Creative Labs.
Since I still use 2 speakers for my computer I can't answer your last question, sorry.

 

[sniperruff]

just get the chaintech as it has excellent reviews. i have a sb live and i love it.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

For the last question, digital output from cards will give you a stereo signal to your receiver for everything except things that are Dolby Digitally or DTS encoded already (DVDs, etc.)

You'll get the right surround sound from DVDs, but gaming will be in stereo if the signal is digital.

The exceptions to this were soundstorm on NF2 boards, and the new X-Mystique... both of which are able to encode in real time and give you surround sound in games through a digital connection.

 

[misterv]

Thanks for the responses. I did some more reading and I found out that, in fact, EAX is merely an extension written to DirectSound3D. I also found that the DirectSound3D API actually produces the 3d sound field regardless of how many channels your soundcard supports. Most older cards don't support hardware directsound3d and therefore Microsoft will software crunch the soundfield into two channels (or the game programmer took account and made a different acoustic solution). Or if your card does support directsound3D+/- EAX but your speaker arrangement is 2 channel, then the soundcard will crunch it (apparently MUCH more efficiently than microsoft). Therefore any soundcard that claims to be multichannel and supports DirectSound3D or EAX will figure out some way of dealing with the 3d soundfield handed to it by DirectSound3D depending on the number of speakers you tell your soundcard you have.

Here's the trouble...my chaintech apparently doesn't do any onboard processing, and sends all the info to be crunched by the processor. The moment I switched it to 5.1 speaker arrangement, the game performance dropped dramatically (I have an older P4 1.8GHz and am playing a rather new game) because it had to figure out how to distribute the sound to 5.1 channels instead of just crunching it to two. So I guess I'll have to go with the audigy 2 zs which handles the speaker processing in house so to speak (or get a new processor/mobo/RAM).

Either way thanks for your help!
Vik