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Video card sound VS

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Dice144

Senior member
How does say a GTX 460 onboard sound chip stack up to avg realtek motherboard sound? Think mine is the 892 chip.

Guys at work daily trying to convince me to go back to creative sound cards. Back in the pre Vista days I really disliked there drivers. Linux support was like pulling teeth to get it to work. Fast forward to today and I mainly only use Win7 on my main rig. I use TOSLINK to my stereo. I have not been able to try my Nvidia sound yet due to no HDMI on my stereo.

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-019-_-Product

Games I play:
Mass Effect 2
Bad Company 2 (cpu audio process)
DragonAge

Also watch movies ALOT.
 
Yes the sound on GTX 460 or even AMD video card sound. How does it stack up. Does it eat alot of CPU cycles etc.
 
For movies the sound is pre-encoded so no difference, both just pass through the existing digital data.

If a game already does its own dolby surround encoding then it should also be the same -- both just pass through the bits.

Otherwise, you're probably only getting stereo from games over the optical while you'd get 5.1 over HDMI, but I have no idea what effect that has on CPU usage.

The HDMI signal is probably uncompressed PCM 5.1 audio which in theory should take very little CPU time, but that's guesswork.
 
ATI soundcards DO have a RealTek sound card chip which does bitstreaming. I believe 460 can do bitstreaming as well so it may also have some kind of sound chip as well.
I don't have one though so I can't say for certain.

Sound is no longer a concern for gamers in terms of CPU. It's so minimal compared to the the number of cores you have that it isn't even a factor unless the game is horrendously coded. Sound quality however might be a concern in which case Creative may not be the best choice. If you're using digital output I don't think it's worth it.
If you have analog input speakers then it can make a difference.
 
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