I'm curious... How much cpu usage do sound cards typically require?

I recently got hold of a 733mhz P3 to use as a second computer. The main computer tends to get used for games etc., so I figured I'd keep this one for myself.

It's got lousy on-board audio, so I bought the Philips psc605 sound card. It was cheap. (I was actually impressed with the qsound enhancer it had. I know purists object, but with headphones, a lot of things sound better to me.)

Anyway, I noticed that the cpu usage was a lot more than the onboard sound required. Even when I turned off all the enhancements.

For other reasons (lack of Linux & dos support), I returned that card and picked up a SB Live 5.1 card. That didn't sound as good as the Philips, but it too used a lot more cpu cycles, even though it has a built in DSP. I ended up returning that card too.

All I was doing was playing a simple WAV and watching a task monitor and watching what percentage of my cpu was free. I turned off all the enhancements and effects. It should have been acting as a 'dumb' sound card.

Unfortunately, this was several weeks ago and I've already forgotten exactly what the cpu usage was, but it was somewhere around 20% just because of that sound card. Onboard sound was only using a few percent. Nearly a 10 times increase.


So, does anybody know of how much cpu usage most sound cards actually take?

The results I got seemed a bit excessive, but that's what I got.

"Plain WAV"
Yeah yeah, your harddrive is reading like crazy

3-4% Winamp playing a MP3 file
P3 667
SB Live (not 5.1)

Daijoubu;

Hard drive usage wouldn't be an issue. Not as long as you have DMA enabled.

With DMA, you should be able to run at full bore drive transfer speed with 15% or less, even on an older system. (That's 30+mbps, which means you could load that full wav file in a second or so.) (Without DMA, you'd max your cpu and get only 1/5th of that rate, depending on your cpu speed.)

If it had been the drive, it would have been the same with both sound cards and the onboard sound chip.

I also tried mp3s, and naturally the cpu usage was higher because it had to decode it.

I wish I could remember the exact cpu usage those took, but it was definetly vastly more than the onboard used, even when I turned off every enhancement & sound effect I could find.

Maybe there is some difference between the SBLive you have and the sb live 51 I tried. Or maybe it's something in Win98se that causes it (although I can't say why it wouldn't cause it with the onboard sound too.)

Anyway, thanks for the reply.

I must know what DMA is, had it off for months and i almost died from it
Hopefully i found out what was wrong, a pin was broken, re-soldered it

I remember having 10-15% when using the WDM drivers from the Audigy
The VXD drivers are less CPU intensive (Also using 98se)

run the ziff davis sound benchmark