just wondering, does anyone know how these audio crads impact cpu load (roughly):

Realtch HD onboard
Audigy 1 (quite old by now, i guess)
X-Fi (thinking of buying this one)

is the HD actually be better than the A1?


00h

This may not be what you are looking for but one of the older versions of 3DMark (either 2001 or 2003 I can't remember) had a testing section where it would play a video sequence without sound, with sound, then with high quality sound to test the impact on frames per second the sound card had. Now if you are using a very old video card or very consumer low-end model that may not work. With any relatively recent video card this test (being so old/outdated) will be CPU bound not GPU bound.

Also, look around in some hardware review sites like Tech Report, where they review soundcards analyzing both and quality and performance in games. This varies from game to game, but some of them gained around 10 fps with an X-Fi.

I think that the HD Audio is actually better than the Audigy. Mostly because it can support 24 and 32 bits audio while the Audigy . I came across an old comparison in one of Tom's Hardware sites time ago that showed that HD Audio chips were superior to the Audigy in the listening tests, so you may skip that old one (you can still find the Audigy SE at some shops if you were wondering).

thanks. didn't find anything in terms of a performance comparison, but i'm opting for the x-fi. it's only 40 eur anyway.

00h

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/s...fi/index.x?pg=6
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2007q1/o...ds/index.x?pg=7

Which X-Fi? There are different models, and some of them have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the product line (all hail Creative). On a cheap X-Fi card you're losing about 10% of CPU time while on the expensive models you lose only 1 or 2%. This is because Creative is putting the "X-Fi" label also on cards that are NOT X-Fi! Yes, that's deceptive marketing, but they're doing it anyway.

Realtech HD is the worse in terms of CPU usage (I have one on my 4CoreDual-VSTA mainboard), but sound quality is very good (according to my subjective hearing). It's not suitable for gaming though; that's Creative's domain.

x-fi gamer. that's why i was asking for cpu load. i don't do much gaming these days, but i like decent performance, when i do.

00h

It will do nicely for games. To be precise, I was referring to the "X-Fi Xtreme Audio" in my previous post; stay away from that card as it's just a normal card without any hardware acceleration at all

Personally, I wish I knew that before buying one for myself. I'm not hating the X-Fi Xtreme Audio because the DSP effects it comes with are not too bad, but it was a bit pricey just for extra DSP effects .

For the CPU impact with this audio card, I noticed a significant framerate drop while playing games. This comes from a computer with a processor such as AMD 64 3400+, ATI x800 XL, and 1GB of RAM.

Same happened to me quite a while back when I bought a SB Live 24-bit. Guess what? It wasn't a SB Live but Creative still put the SB Live label on it. I got it to get "EAX Advanced HD" effects on games. The card's box even has the "EAX Advanced HD" logo on it! Imagine how angry I was when I found out that I couldn't enable that feature in any of my games, most of them reporting "no suitable hardware was found", while my browser has the Creative site opened where it claims "supports EAX Advanced HD" on the card's page.

That's not just deceptive marketing; it's full-blown lying and customer rip-off.

Unfortunately, Creative is the only choice for gamers and one has to recommend their hugely overpriced cards simply because there's no alternative.

i just saw, that the x-fi gamer comes in two variants:

x-fi gamer (standard)

x-fi gamer (fatality edition, with 64mb onboard ram)


has anyone an idea, if there is any performance difference?

i have 4gig ram in my machine (not primarily for gaming, mind you ), so 64mb don't seem to be much of an improvement.

the damn online shop, i ordered the standard edition from still hasn't gotten the thing, so i can still change my mind...


00h

Not much of a difference. Read this whole review to see the possible gains.

thanx. didn't read this one either, until now. outsourcing ram makes sense, though. but that may be just my inner coder speaking...


00h

just an update...

still don't have my x-fi. creative seems to have problems delivering them. anyway, i did a FPS comparison of my onboard realtek and my old audigy 1.

system:
dual-core 1,8ghz, 4gig ram, radeon x1950xt

software:
insanely modded oblivion @1024x768 (+hdr +qtp3 +aevwd +all kinds of sound mods +...)


realtek hd alc883 onboard + v1.75 drivers -> 35fps (average)

good old audigy1 + newest drivers -> 41fps (average)


sound quality is about the same. my guess is, that the number of independent channels makes the real difference (10 for the realtek, 64 for the audigy)


00h

3DMark03 has a sound benchmark. Note that Oblivion doesn't utilize the full amount of channels the X-Fi supports. 3DMarks checks the speed gain with 32 and 63 channels.

(3DMark03 can be downloaded for free, btw)