Do Sound Cards Affect System Performance?

Do Sound Cards Affect System Performance?

I currently have an 8800 GTX p6n Q6600 Quad and 4 gigs of ram. I am using the motherboard audio piece.

I have heard that getting a "real audio card" will improve game performance(currently running AoC at about 30-60 fps). How true is this?

If it does, would you guys say this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6829102006 is a good card?


Thanks for your time.

-Mike

really, nowadays although i haven't seen any up to date test i would say not really.

in past years especially when the audigies were coming out and eax was becoming more advance you just couldn't rely on a cpu to process 64 different sounds with effects without a noticable performance impact, of course it is difficult to measure as creative always limited onboard to usally a couple of eax gen behind, now with openal i am not sure how it all works but i would imagine that cpu's like yours can handle themselves.

If you use XP and games which support EAX then it will benefit with a soundcard not really by performance but quality however with Openal games i am really not sure as i haven't seen any reviews.

might be worth searching for.

i've read it might do 1-5 fps increase. iam using x-fi music with 2 mb ram.

The short answer is yes. It does have an affect on performance. There will be a slight boost, although it might not be noticible.

Back when I got my audigy 2 I had winXP, an athlon 3000+ and 512mb of Ram... I noticed a nice little boost in FPS. With my current system, I dont think if I switched back to onboard I would notice a performance hit. I do however think that onboard sounds like poo... but thats not the issue at hand.

Even tho it will improve your FPS slightly I would only recommend it if you also want an improvement your sound quality, otherwise it is just an expensive way to get a few extra FPS.

A few year's ago, I read that having a separate sound card can result in approximately a 5% improvement in CPU performance. I'd guess that with modern equipment, you could get a few percentage points of an improvement, but probably not even noticeable.

However, there's another problem with Vista -- no support for Creative Labs drivers (EAX). Which is the reason I have 2 SB cards at home sitting on a shelf, while I use the onboard sound on the ASUS motherboard. You can read a little about the Vista problems here:
http://apcmag.com/creative_puts_ea [...] _vista.htm

Given that the only Creative Labs card that will now work with Vista is the X-Fi, you're much better off putting that money elsewhere, as noted above (extra RAM, better graphics card, etc.).

If they are from Creative, YES they do affect badly

I noticed a slight improvement going from onboard to my Audigy 2 Platinum. I did it more for the 5 1/4" front-panel with L/R inputs, though. (And any way I look at it, an $11 investment on ebay was worth at least TRYING.)

It depends. Mixing the channels and calculating the 3D would use some of the CPU, but that's done on the HW nowadays - even with cheap chips.
However, I don't think all effects are done on the HW.
And how about the on-board memory? If the card has it's own memory, the samples can be loaded there so there's no need to constantly transfer (DMA) the sound data.

Creative was makeing people buy a "Vista" sound card when all that was needed was a driver...and -all- their sound cards would work with Vista (their Vista drivers are still crap).
When the public found this information out the sh!t hit the fan.

Unless your system is more than 5-6 years old you have no reason to use a sound card as the onboard sound is just as good for almost everyone.
If your so into music an think you can hear between them than you should be using a stand alone high end music system anyhow.

Can someone confirm or deny this? Why would a USB headset work better than onboard, isn't the sound still decoded from the cpu with USB? (Other than it just decoding in 2.1 instead of a say, 5.1)

Just double checking cause that seems contrary to what i've heard in the past.

I shed a tear of joy reading this one. So true, so true.

In oblivion, when firing an arrow at a longer than medium range you can hear a crisp but subtle thud (using a decent sound card). With onboard such as ac97 or HD soundmax, there's either no sound or an annoying static-ish whimper and this is just an example scratching the surface.

there was a article the compared the two and there is like within 1 to 2% difference. It was awhile since I seen it. And your partially wrong Modtech. While there are different knids of onboard sound chips they all don't suck. My board uses a Realtek HD Audioand it sounds great. And I use Klipsch prodmedia 4.1's. Not exactly your $100 pair of speakers.