Sound cards and processor usage

[mitush]

Where can I find comparative benchmarks for sound cards/chipsets on how much do they load the processor (in games)?
Is this a relevant question at all? If the processor usage is less than 5%, I guess, its not relevant.
But it looks like (link) that its more like
10%-40% which makes it much more interesting. If we care about 2%-4% perfomance difference in Q3A for different
motherboards, we should care about a sound card that can easily eat up to 40% of the fps rate.

 

[Comp625]

I might not be much help but I remember seeing a graph on Firingsquad that compared the CPU utilization of all the Sound boards. Can't remember which article it's in though. Sorry

 

[neuralfx]

oh no, its not anywhere near that much, my guess is that its less than 5%, .. load up an mp3, or whatever you want, and use task manager, if u have win2k, or performance monitoring software, and see what the load is .. the load there shouldnt represent much difference than in-game sound .. i could be wrong though ..
-neural

 

[mitush]

It looks like its more than 5% (see the link in the original post)

 

[mitush]

On the other hand, from this review it follows that the CPU utilization rate is something like 2-3%. It is still not clear what do they mean by "without sound": disabling the sound card in the dev manager or just turning off the sound in the game menu.

 

[Comp625]

I remember reading somewhere that newer cards have less than 5% CPU utilization. The LIVE had a 20% utilization and then they staretd to talk about how the LIVE is 4 years old and the Audigy is the "Next Generation" so to speak.

 

[mitush]

In this thread some people with the "next generation" Creative Labs Audigy still report 20% fps rate hit by turning the sound on (Q3A).