External Sound: Creative Labs Extigy

Gaming Results

DirectSound And DirectSound 3D Results

The level of use of processor capacity measured represents how much of the central processor's capacity was used when the card was playing on 8, 16 and 32 DirectSound 3D tracks. The figures noted were unequivocal. The Extigy behaved like one of the worst sound cards we have ever tested. This is not the fault of the Extigy itself but of data transfer via the USB port, which monopolizes up to 20% of the Pentium 4 at 2 GHz! These figures have been extrapolated from a theoretical benchmark. It only remains to be seen if the performance drops as drastically in practice in a gaming environment.

Results In Quake III Arena

In Quake III, the Extigy again put in a poor performance. When compared to the Audigy, there is a loss that can be as much as 24 images per second, or an almost 20% reduction in performance.

Half Life Results

The same performance level was noted in Half Life using the Survive demo that uses EAX. The activation of the EAX with the Extigy did not produce a major deterioration in performance, but there was still a loss of around 20% of images per second in comparison to PCI cards.