Big Sound, Low Price: Creative Audigy

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CPU Utilization Rate

The utilization rate of the processor is a major preoccupation of amateur players of First Person Shooters. They especially don't want the sound reproduction slowing down the game. Modern PCI sound cards are not very demanding in this regard, and the Audigy card confirms this tendency. The measurements are close to those obtained with the old Live ! 5.1, with the Audigy having the slight edge. On our test machine, equipped with an AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz processor, a GeForce Pro 3D card and 128 Mb of RAM DDR, the high-quality sound processing in Quake 3 only slowed down the game by about 3%, or around two frames per second.

More objectively, the reproduction of 32, 16 bit, static voices at 44.1 kHz while using Direct Sound 3D uses 2.3% of the CPU resources as against 2.85% with Live ! 5.1, according to Audio Winbench. The Hercules Fortissimo II card, a benchmark in this area, uses 1.13%. In practice, the Direct Sound 3D sound at the best quality available won't cost you more than one to three frames per second depending on the game and your configuration. The EAX is a bit more demanding, but this varies widely according to the game: normally, between two to six frames per second. At any rate, if you really want to be right on frame, you can always deactivate the 3D sound or the EAX. To sum up: the Audigy is one of the lowest-consumption sound cards on the market, and when put together with a high-performance system, it won't adversely affect games performance.